The Cold War's Accidental Whale Observatory

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.

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/

>> 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 accesa. Heck, the UK and canadian waters of the north atlantic where the most interesting place for watching russian.

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...