Jimmy Carter is also one of the few living Americans to have a ship named for him.
Ronald Reagan got a
carrier named after him, but Jimmy (very appropriately, since he was a
nuc) lent his name to
SSN-23, a
Seawolf class
nuclear submarine.
The Jimmy Carter is under construction at the Electric Boat Company in Groton, CT (USA). She will be the third boat of her class. The thing that kills me is the rumored 'other mission' of the Carter. Most recently noted on no other than Slashdot, the Carter apparently is undergoing a multi-billion dollar retrofit before she is even launched. This is not surprising given that the Seawolf class were designed strictly as silver-bullet ASW platforms for blue water, something that's not in great demand at the moment. It is ironic as all hell, however, that this rumored 'special capability' is the capability to locate, grab, bring inside a special chamber and allow men to work on undersea fiber-optic cables.
The work in question, naturally, involves splicing taps into the cables in order to allow some nonexistent types in ---REDACTED--- to tap and monitor communication across these cables. According to some shadowy former players, these folks succeeded in tapping a cable in the mid 1990s, if not in deciphering the mass of data flowing through it.
Ironic. The man whose legacy includes such monuments to peace and freedom as the Carter Center, with its focus on democracy through free and open elections and politics, has had his name hung on an enormously expensive ($4 billion-plus, counting retrofit) example of the U.S. government's refusal to allow its citizens (and trading partners) any decent amount of privacy.
I'm not sure how I feel about the tapping itself; que sera sera. However, the naming struck me as twisted.