The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory

(mitpress.mit.edu)

37 points | by pseudolus 3 days ago

4 comments

  • sm001 1 hour ago
    The 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 1 hour ago
      Thanks for sharing. So much yet to learn about this topic.
    • lukan 1 hour 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?

  • dfc 1 hour ago
    If 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/

  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 11 minutes ago
    My father was stationed in Keflavik guarding SOSUS and watching for Spetsnaz infiltration.
  • xg15 2 hours 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...

    • lb1lf 29 minutes ago
      Secret-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!'

    • wbl 54 minutes ago
      Look up the local names for Tongue of the Ocean and you'll have even more gist for that mill.
    • hagbard_c 1 hour ago
      No 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.