The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
51 points by pseudolus 4 days ago
sm001 4 hours 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.
dfc 2 hours ago
I never heard anyone say "October Missile Crisis." Did you grow up in Cuba or a Cuban American community?
sandworm101 an hour ago
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
dmos62 4 hours ago
Thanks for sharing. So much yet to learn about this topic.
lukan 4 hours 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 4 hours ago
I think his friend may have been known as "seaman Beaumont" https://clip.cafe/the-hunt-red-october-1990/seaman-beaumont/
lukan 3 hours ago
dfc 4 hours 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.
sm001 4 hours ago
thanks
sandworm101 an hour 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 an hour ago
But were they given access to the raw data, or reports?
sandworm101 an hour ago
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3 hours ago
My father was stationed in Keflavik guarding SOSUS and watching for Spetsnaz infiltration.
lysace 2 hours ago
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.
xg15 5 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 3 hours 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 3 hours ago
Look up the local names for Tongue of the Ocean and you'll have even more gist for that mill.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3 hours ago
hagbard_c 4 hours 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.
xg15 36 minutes ago
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.