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The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory
- xg15 4mo ago> the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a complex array of hydrophones fixed on the ocean floor and connected by cables to secret listening stations set up along coasts all over the world. One for the conspiracy theorists...
- hagbard_c 4mo agoNo conspiracy needed, SOSUS was a known fact, the Soviet Union made attempts to find and disable the hydrophones, Tom Clancy wrote many a novel in which SOSUS was mentioned or played a role, etc. It was the ocean equivalent of the Key Hole satellites, used to monitor the movements of Soviet 'boomers' - nuclear missile subs.
- xg15 4mo agoThere is no "conspiracy" in the sense of a shadowy cabal or secret organization. But I think it's remarkable how such a huge project which must have involved the participation of dozens of governments could have been done without any press coverage or civil society involvement.
- lukan 4mo agoI think I also never read about that in any newspaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
- applicative 4mo agoYes that was the point. It was good. Ukraine had an identical plan -- same as Russia had the feared plan in the SE, where state institutions failed.
- wbl 4mo agoLook up the local names for Tongue of the Ocean and you'll have even more gist for that mill.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoAUTEC range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Undersea_Test_and_Evaluation_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Undersea_Test_and_Eva...
- lb1lf 4mo agoSecret-ish. One of the links terminated in a seeming boathouse at Andøya in Norway. It was a landmark. As in, if you were going fishing with a colleague and asked him which boathouse we'd embark from, he was as likely as not to say 'Three boathouses down from the hush one!'
- dfc 4mo agoIf this article is interesting to you I highly recommend War of the Whales. It is an interesting look at Cold war science+politics and the environment. A decent part of the book is about SOSUS. https://warofthewhales.com/ https://warofthewhales.com/
- sm001 4mo agothanks
- sm001 4mo agoThe author included, near the end, a paragraph about me and my best friend the sonar operator who taught me a lot of what I know about cetacean communication in the 1970s. He was hunting soviet subs in 1962 and he saved us from a nuclear war during the October Missile Crisis because he had detected a sub that the Russians were thinking was not detectable. My friend had also conducted experimental acoustic interactions with cetaceans at sea.
- dmos62 4mo agoThanks for sharing. So much yet to learn about this topic.
- lukan 4mo ago"he saved us from a nuclear war during the October Missile Crisis because he had detected a sub that the Russians were thinking was not detectable" How did this prevent nuclear war? Why would the soviets otherwise have launched a first strike?
- conartist6 4mo agoI think his friend may have been known as "seaman Beaumont" https://clip.cafe/the-hunt-red-october-1990/seaman-beaumont/ https://clip.cafe/the-hunt-red-october-1990/seaman-beaumont/
- lukan 4mo agoErm, are we talking about a hollywood movie or reality? And to my knowledge, the october missile crisis has nothing to do with that movie, except submarines are the topic.
- conartist6 4mo agoI have no idea. The more I hear the more I think the movie was referencing more real happenings than I had understood. Very early in the movie Seaman Jones (the golden ear) and rookie Beaumont are at the sonar station and Jones pulls a little training stunt. He chides the Beaumont: "like Beethoven on the computer, you have labored to produce... a biologic. ... ... A whale, Beaumont, a whale, a marine mammal that knows a hell of a lot more about sonar than you do."
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoMy father was stationed in Keflavik guarding SOSUS and watching for Spetsnaz infiltration.
- lysace 4mo agoThe old and new cold war sensor networks in the fairly constrained Baltic Sea are fascinating. There is so much vague lore. There is so little public information on them, yet they intuitively make so much sense, given how much was expended on other related aspects. And sometimes you do get hints that they do, in fact exist. (My perspective is from Sweden.) I guess I'm saying that I'm impressed with their operational security.
- sandworm101 4mo ago>> No one outside the Pentagon got to listen to most of these recordings until decades later Ya, total bunk. There was/is a multinational intelligence sharing community. Certainly the "five eyes" nations would have acces. Heck, the UK and Canadian waters of the north Atlantic where the most interesting place for watching Russian subs.
- grumbelbart2 4mo agoBut were they given access to the raw data, or reports?
- sandworm101 4mo agoI would bet that nobody had the raw data. There would have been too much of it to record and move using the tech of the time. The system probably created contact reports, little more than a pointer and a timestamp, at local stations and shared those electronically with a central database for triangulation.
- mncharity 4mo agoThe existence of SOSUS wasn't all upside for whale data. Startup goes to patent a hydrophone improvement for marine research. Is told it's already secretly patented, and being classified, they can't make them - thank you for playing, good bye.
- dTal 4mo ago[dead]