Navy will name sub after North Dakota - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Navy will name sub after North Dakota

WASHINGTON — The Navy is planning to name a new nuclear submarine after North Dakota for the first time in 85 years, the state’s congressional delegation and Gov. John Hoeven announced Monday.

State officials have been pushing the Navy to name a new ship after the state for more than a decade, with little success.

The three Democratic members of the state’s congressional delegation — Sens. Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, and Rep. Earl Pomeroy — and Republican Gov. Hoeven launched a renewed effort in recent months. The group recruited former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a Navy veteran and Scranton, N.D., native, to serve as honorary chairman of the USS North Dakota Committee.

The delegation and the governor met with Navy Secretary Donald Winter in June. Pomeroy said the meeting was well-timed because the new submarines had not yet been named.

Pomeroy said the group conveyed that the state would be a “supportive community” to the sailors on the ship.

“We’re not looking at this as just a name on the hull,” he said.

The new ship is expected to be commissioned in 2014 and is currently under construction in Groton, Conn., the delegation and Hoeven said. A Naval spokesman would not confirm the naming Monday.

There has only been one USS North Dakota, a vessel that was commissioned as a battleship in 1910 and was a gunnery and engineering training ship during World War I. It was decommissioned in 1923 and sold for scrap in 1931.