The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu52 points by pseudolus 4 days ago
52 points by pseudolus 4 days 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.
I never heard anyone say "October Missile Crisis." Did you grow up in Cuba or a Cuban American community?
But sosus was not really about listening. Anyone can listen and hear things underwater. Listening to a sub sounds cool but doesnt answer the real question: where is the sub? What made sosus powerful was the network to merge data from different sensors to triangulate a location. The effort to match contacts between sensors separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, using 1970s tech, must have been immense.
We have all seen sonar waterfall displays, what most do not realize is that those came before the large CRT screens needed to display the data. The "screen" was actually a printer continuously printing the output from a microphone array.
Waterfall printer display is at the 18:52 point. (Footage of these is very rare.) https://youtu.be/fJafj2o3Wo4
"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?
I think his friend may have been known as "seaman Beaumont" https://clip.cafe/the-hunt-red-october-1990/seaman-beaumont/
Erm, 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.
I 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."
I read the book. And there were certainly real references to submarine hunting. But the reference to preventing WW3 by finding a enemy sub is still lost on me.
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.
>> 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.
But were they given access to the raw data, or reports?
I 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.
My father was stationed in Keflavik guarding SOSUS and watching for Spetsnaz infiltration.
The 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.
> 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...
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!'
Look up the local names for Tongue of the Ocean and you'll have even more gist for that mill.
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.
There 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.