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Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay is a base of the United States Navy located adjacent to the city of St. Marys in Camden County, Georgia, on the East River in southeastern Georgia, and 38 miles from Jacksonville, Florida. The Submarine Base is the U.S. Atlantic Fleet's home port for U.S. Navy Fleet ballistic missile nuclear submarines capable of being armed with Trident missile nuclear weapons. This submarine base covers about 16,000 acres of land, of which 4,000 acres are protected wetlands.

The US Army began to acquire 7,000 acres of land at Kings Bay in 1954 to build a military ocean terminal to ship ammunition in case of a national emergency. Construction began in 1955 and was completed in 1958. A 200-foot-wide channel was dredged to Cumberland Sound, and included two turning basins. The most prominent feature of the terminal was its 2,000-foot-long, 87-foot-wide concrete-and-steel wharf. It had three parallel railroad tracks, enabling the simultaneous loading of several ammunition ships from rail cars and trucks. Elsewhere on the base, the Army laid 47 miles of railroad tracks. Spurs off the main line ran into temporary storage areas protected by earthen barricades.

In May 1979, the U.S. Navy selected Kings Bay as its preferred East Coast site for the new Ohio-class Trident submarines. On 23 October 1980, after a one-year environmental impact study was completed, and with Congressional approval, the Secretary of the Navy announced that Kings Bay would be the future home port for the new Trident-missile submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. The decision to base the Trident submarines at Kings Bay started the largest peacetime construction program ever undertaken by the U.S. Navy. The program took nine years to complete at a cost of about $1.3 billion.

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