Sound surveillance system
The Sound Surveillance System ( SOSUS , German noise monitoring system ) is an American eavesdropping system that was installed in the oceans in the 1950s to monitor Soviet submarine movements.
technology
A SOSUS station consists of several hydrophones placed on the sea floor . These are connected by underwater cables to a station on land, where the incoming data is analyzed. The buoys are mainly installed on continental slopes or underwater mountains so that they can listen as undisturbed as possible over a long range. This, in combination with the extreme sensitivity of the sensors, allows SOSUS to detect acoustic powers of less than one watt over a distance of several hundred kilometers.
SOSUS is a chain of passive underwater sensor buoys, most of which are sunk in the North Atlantic. There they monitor the so-called GIUK gap , the sea area between Greenland , Iceland and Great Britain . The continental shelf of the US coasts and the region around the Aleutian Islands are also covered by the system. Sensors listen for sound signals from formerly Soviet , now Russian submarines of the Northern Fleet , which come from bases on the Kola Peninsula and have to cross this gap in order to reach the Atlantic . A few sensors are also installed in other locations in the Atlantic (e.g. near the Azores ) and in the Pacific .
history
The development of SOSUS was started in 1949 by the Committee for Undersea Warfare (German Committee for Undersea Warfare ). Back then, the main concern was finding diesel submarines snorkeling. For this purpose, each station should have several low-frequency scanners that would be able to determine the position of the boat . The development expenditure should be 10 million US dollar amount per year.
In 1950, Western Electric built the first station consisting of six buoys and installed it near the island of Eleuthera , Bahamas . After tests there, the first six stations were sunk in the North Atlantic Basin a year later, and three more a short time later. Ships of the US Navy and the Royal Navy began laying the necessary underwater cables. This was done under the code name Project Caesar . That was also the period in which the name SOSUS was first formed. In 1953, buoys were developed in Bell Labs that had additional high-frequency systems with which a ship could be "peded" directly above the buoy. These should mainly be used in roads and shallow water areas. In the next year ten more stations were built and seven of them sunk in the Pacific. Evaluation stations were also built.
In 1961 SOSUS tracked the missile submarine USS George Washington (SSBN-598) all the way from the United States to Great Britain , and a year later the first Soviet diesel submarine was tracked down. During the Cuban Missile Crisis , the test system received the noise of a Foxtrot class boat in front of the Bahamas . In the years that followed, SOSUS was continuously improved in order to keep pace with the progress that was being made in the noise insulation of the submarines.
In 1968 the SOSUS was used to locate the American nuclear submarine Scorpion , which sank about 400 miles (740 km) southwest of the Azores around May 22nd .
With the end of the Cold War , a system like SOSUS became obsolete from a military point of view, which is why most of the sensors are now switched off (but still functional). Some buoys, especially in the Pacific, are used to eavesdrop on whales.
The project was not officially confirmed until 1991, even if its existence was well known many years beforehand. The first announcements were made by Tom Clancy , who had already described SOSUS and how it works in detail in 1984 in his book The Hunt for Red October .
See also
- North Atlantic # meaning
- K-129 , Soviet submarine
Web links
- SOSUS - The “Secret Weapon” of Undersea Surveillance in Navy magazine Undersea Warfare (English)
- Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) from GlobalSecurity.org (English)