The job of building the NR-1 fell to Electric Boat (EB), the storied shipyard that specialized in producing nuclear submarines. Rickover had turned to EB to build the historic USS Nautilus for his first nuclear reactor in 1955 when no one else would touch the project. In the decade since the Nautilus first went to sea, nuclear reactors and Navy ships had steadily grown bigger and bigger, and now Rickover wanted to go smaller! Herculean technological and engineering challenges had to be met to produce such things as the mini-reactor, a perfectly circular hull and a special grappling arm that could retrieve sunken items weighing up to a thousand pounds. To maintain secrecy, Rickover stole every penny of the huge price tag from the budgets of other projects, leaving much of the Navy brass in the dark.