NEWPORT NEWS, Va. >> The nuclear submarines built here at Newport News Shipyard and at General Dynamics Electric Boat works in Groton, Conn., stealthily carry vast lethality that can deter occasions for unleashing it. The submarines are assembled to completion in both places. They are magnificent examples of applied intelligence, with a beauty akin to that of old-time clipper ships, those elegant mergers of form and function.

A potentially lethal problem is that U.S. submarines might be too few to keep global peace during today’s multifront assault on geopolitical rationality. Jerry Hendrix, retired Navy captain and senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, wrote in American Affairs that the U.S. nuclear submarine fleet was 140 boats at its Cold War high, when everywhere Soviet submarines turned, they “found themselves being monitored and tracked” by U.S. submarines.

The most recent figures are that the U.S. submarine fleet now numbers 68, only 50 of which are of the hunter-killer “fast attack” category. And 20 of those are, Hendrix says, “in drydocks or tied to piers” because of the Navy’s three-year maintenance backlog. So, “the Navy is currently short three drydocks and the workforce that goes with them.” No entirely new shipyard has been built in a century.

In 1988, John Keegan, a British military historian, said the nuclear submarine was the ultimate instrument of deterrence. Deterrence depends on a capacity to prevent an adversary from believing that it can inflict a disarming first strike, leaving the attacked nation without the ability to retaliate.

Of the U.S. nuclear triad, land-based ICBMs in their silos can be targeted, and bombers carrying nuclear weapons can be attacked. But unless the oceans become transparent, which new technologies (e.g., swarms of underwater drones; abilities to detect faint wakes or radiation) might someday make them, ballistic-missile submarines — they are called “boomers” but are masterpieces of silence — are the most dependable components of deterrence.

A former U.S. admiral has said, “It’s easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a submarine at sea.” This, even though a boomer is nearly two football fields long. Protected by fast-attack submarines (which also menace an adversary’s undersea nuclear weapons), boomers thwart an enemy’s ability to locate and target all U.S. nuclear-weapon launchers — the U.S. capacity to retaliate against a nuclear attack.

There are 50 U.S. attack submarines; the Navy considers 66 requisite for today’s missions and possible eventualities. Hendrix says China has anti-access/area-denial missiles and other weapons to hold at bay most U.S. military platforms. If China attacks Taiwan, most U.S. forces could not go to its defense. “But American submarines can.”

Under the trilateral AUKUS agreement, Australia is to receive up to eight nuclear-powered, conventionally armed submarines. We need a forward-based submarine force, and a submarine surge capacity for the Indo-Pacific. The nation can afford this — it cannot afford not to afford it — but the industrial capacity to build it does not exist.

An analyst at the Congressional Research Service told the Wall Street Journal last year that it could take three to five years to train a welder for working on nuclear submarines. Everything, down to sound-suppressing wrappings on pipes, must serve silence.

And the boats’ complexity is incomprehensible to all but a few. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter requires more than 8 million lines of code; nuclear submarines and their weapons require even more.

Across the nation, workers at the 2,500 suppliers of submarine components — pipes, valves, gauges, and on and on — sometimes say, “I don’t know what submarines do. I just sit here and make this part.” The Navy, concerned about competing for help in a tight labor market, tries to infuse its suppliers with a motivating sense of importance, telling them: “Here is what is happening in the world and how your part fits in the larger picture.”

The Apprentice School at this shipyard receives up to 4,000 applications a year (about 14 percent from people with college degrees) for about 250 places. Those admitted receive a free education of at least four years, and a chance for a job at the shipyard, where more than 80 percent of the school’s graduates hired are still working 10 years later.

Those who say America “doesn’t make anything anymore” should see the submarines and aircraft carriers materializing here. The shipyard is 30 miles from Yorktown, where George Washington commanded the climactic battle of the war that secured America’s independence. Preservation of the nation depends heavily on what 27,000 shipbuilders do here.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.