Deep underwater, submariners are likely unaware of pandemic
latimes.com
latimes.com
My father worked aboard one, and we got to send a weekly “familygram” message - a short, telegram-style message where you put one word in each box until you’re out of boxes, and then mail it off to the Navy. You weren’t allowed to even hint at any bad news - not even that the dog had died - and we were told that any bad news would be removed from the message. And receiving a too-short, redacted, or no familygram at all would probably be more worrying than not being told at all.
The reality of it is that if you’re half-way through a 10-week patrol, there’s nothing about this pandemic that’s remotely useful to you. Nothing you can do, nothing you can say, no way you can benefit from this information. It’s 100% useless mental overhead.
And to be honest, I think I’m a little jealous right now. I don’t think 100% news saturation is good for us either.
Surely it's a planning consideration for the commanders? I think they get world news so that they can inform their decision if they need to decide for example where they go if they can't contact London.
Radio and satellite comms on the periscopes, among other things.
The major countries all have thousands of merchant vessels traveling in every major shipping lane all over the world. My thinking is navies would be worried about these ships being equipped with sensors that analyze satellite signals looking for what could be intended for submarine communication. Eaves droppers wouldn't even need to break the encryption of the signal, they'd only need to be aware of a signal is being broadcast to only a specific region of the the ocean and that bears other attributes associated with military communication.
Broadcasting over a larger area reduces the ability of an adversary to infer location from the signal, but increases the likelihood of intercept. That alone might not be terribly useful, but it can be combined with other bits of information and form a more complete picture. For example, if you know when and where the sub was last docked, fleet movements, regional events that are of military interest, and you have a signal with a message you suspect was intended for them, then that's enough bits of information to be useful.
There are trade-offs. If you're required to minimize the the likelihood of discovery at all costs, then it makes sense to never even attempt communication while underway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines
The article confirms this:
> Salles said the situation now will be toughest for any crews that leave harbor in the weeks ahead, because they’ll know they are leaving loved ones in the midst of the pandemic and, possibly, still living in lockdown. The French government has already extended its stay-home orders once, to April 15, and said it could do so again.
> Salles said he believes those crews will get regular coronavirus updates, but won’t be told of any family deaths until they are returning to the l’Ile Longue submarine base, near Brest in Brittany.
That would require you to be able to decrypt the encrypted signal that the satellite is broadcasting. Which you can't.
All these third party observers see is a bunch of digital noise continuously being broadcast by the satellites. They have no way of telling digital noise destined for a particular sub from the rest of the digital noise. So the signals convey no useful information to them.
So using it as a “sign of civilization” (one of multiple) sounds quaint, but with a perfectly logical reason behind it.
You only need a half-decent microphone.
You could do it on a bad microphone if you wanted!
The Archers is a timeless part of the background noise in many family kitchens in the UK. Seems a shame not to fight through this little piece of calm for normal families in this time of crisis.
If BBC4 goes down, but you're still able to call London on a satellite phone, you don't go nuking Russia. If you have a half dozen different signs of nuclear war and BBC4 is down, it's a point in the "well shit" direction.
So if Northwood goes silent, but the cricket is uninterupted, there's probably something wrong with Northwood. If everything's gone, there's probably something wrong with your radio. But if Northwood's gone, the BBC's gone, but VOA is still up .. you start wondering if something's wrong with the UK.
(For example. I'm not privy to anything the rest of us aren't. But it's clear that it's an item on a checklist that happens to have some novelty value, rather than being our "systema perimetr".)
The person you're replying to is talking about the impossibility of faking a day of idiomatic BBC Radio 4 broadcasting, and I'm inclined to agree that the individual personalities and programmes are so incredibly ingrained in most British minds and the details are so subtle that you'd have no chance of being convincing.
[1] https://ia800108.us.archive.org/9/items/OperationAspidistra/...
I agree. In Italy basically all the news are just about the coronavirus and nothing else, plus a lot of sensationalism ("we're all gonna die" style), and the Big Brother style press conference every day with the reports of daily numbers of cases, deaths, and recoveries.
It's so aggravating and anxiety inducing that I only check a news roundup in the morning and I shut myself away from any other news sources. Not ideal, but at this point it's the only way to make sure I'm not consumed by the constant stream of bad news.
I wish we'd talk more about the effects of the media's reporting style on psychological health. Do we really need headlines and reports about individual deaths every day, live tickers, and an unending amount of notifications and newsletters regarding the same?
For people with anxiety disorders it can be total hell right now (talking from experience), and it's much less because of the virus itself than the reporting.
Curious about this term - is that the back-translated version of "Big Brother" from 1984?
There's a limit to well I can self-isolate, and I'm sure I'm already taking every possible precaution. Being more anxious will accomplish nothing.
It’s useful also for non-pandemic times.
I have attempted to stay away from news media since around 2018. Around last November, I decided to make a complete cut and stop consuming anything "news related" from secondary sources like podcasts, reddit comment threads etc. I expected that I'd live in ignorance, but I'd gain some peace of mind.
This change has had a far greater impact on me than what I had originally assumed. First surprise is that I still find out everything that's going on in the world that's relevant to me or people I care about. Second, I feel like I turned sober for the first time in years - I've had soo much creativity and mental energy that bloomed out of nowhere within a few days after I stopped punishing my thought process with news from the world.
There are a few things I have discovered in the past few months. First, if you put in effort to find very high quality information about an event that you hear about, you will usually find something from primary sources that are orders of magnitude better than anything that's published on popular media. Second, there really aren't that many new things happening in the world all the time - 30 mins of effort a week is usually sufficient to be on top of everything going on.
There are a ton of people who will convince you that it's your moral duty to follow news as closely as possible. It's totally not worth it.
I’ve regressed a bit with news subreddits under 30 minutes a day, and will read links from friends, but I’ve found that it’s mostly propaganda.
> There are a ton of people who will convince you that it's your moral duty to follow news as closely as possible. It's totally not worth it.
Most “news” is either PR or propaganda. So is “your duty” to keep consuming it.
Side note: I buy all the Australian newspapers during the Christmas holiday and force myself to go through it, and it’s always a reminder how it’s all a waste of time.
One thing that has suprised me is the lack of any non-virus news that is around. The virus and it's fallout can't be the only thing happening in the world at the moment! The only non-virus related news I've seen over the last couple of weeks is a couple of local court cases and North Korea firing something into the ocean. Oh and we had a local government election here in Queensland which got about an inch of coverage.
This tells me that most of the normal news we get fed is pretty much non-essential filler.
And yet you're commenting here, in a news-related comment thread?
Today I refused to switch on the tv and somehow nothing spectacular happened. I hope we are done with this news nonsense.
Radio is a bit better.
All the best for Italy, we were supposed to be in a week on vacation near Genua :(
We are closely watching you and hope your downtrend is real. All the best, ciao!
Thanks for the kind words. I actually did not even hear about a down trend ...
One point I want to add to what I wrote before: this stream of news can also be detrimental to interpersonal relationships during a long quarantine.
Long-term confinement can already strain some relationships, the news can make things even worse. Another point to avoid talking about it among family members.
The children are teenagers and they have enough work from school to keep them busy. They also have me handy, so we talk about their work quite often.
They also help with the house more than usual.
If it was not for the food which is a pain in the bottom to get, and the fact that one cannot do sport outside (biking for instance) it would not be bad at all for us (I am talking about our specific case)
It is true that we do not discuss the pandemy itself too much (as there is not much to discuss)
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BRITISH_FIELD_SERVIC...
I've been a little overloaded by metric in tech for the past several years to the point that I sometimes call out metrics getting added as unactionable. There's a cult of metric collection because we can, not because there's anything meaningful there.
The test for Huntington’s (a genetic disease that is 100% fatal and usually starts in your 30s or 40s) might be a good analogue. You’d think everyone would want to know (50% chance if one your parents has it). But IIRC, less than 50% get the test.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarine...
The VLF section above that one is also relevant.
[1]. https://fas.org/man/dod-101/navy/docs/scmp/part07.htm
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-deadliest-air...
[2]. https://www.public.navy.mil/subfor/underseawarfaremagazine/I...
Obviously - they wouldn't be any use if you couldn't tell them to fire their missiles while they were submerged, would they?
real-time communication with subs is probably only necessary to rapidly coordinate a first strike, or to specifically order them not to fire in an ambiguous situation.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge knows if it's possible to give an authenticated order along the lines of "if you don't hear back from us in an hour, launch all your missiles." I've never heard of such a thing but there are at least two former submariners here on hn, so...
They do in the US system! If you don't retaliate immediately then you're dead, and so you can't send the order to fire, so you can't retaliate at all.
In the UK system you don't need to retaliate immediately as authority to fire is delegated to the commander - no magic codes like in the US.
Now I was on fast-attack submarines (versus ballistic missile boats), but we regularly got email roughly every day when at sea. During certain operations, we would even regularly get an abridged NYTimes PDF news summary sent to us. And my grandmother died when I was underway on deployment - I got notified immediately. (Though obviously wasn't able to travel back.)
One important thing is that the IT admins on the boat had various scripts they'd run against all the email sent/received to help ensure that classified information didn't leak out, or troubling information (I think like family deaths?) leak in. But it never felt invasive.
Maybe the French Navy operates very differently than the American Navy, but... I call BS on this article.
When a ballistic missile submarine is NOT on patrol they operate just like a fast-attack submarine.
Nobody inside but the captain and the second in command know where they are.
Source : was in the French navy 2005-2007. I got to see them leave and enter through the straight near Brest. They do it surfaced as apparently the nuclear drive is hot enough to be detectable in the straight, so there is no point on doing it underwater. Take this last tidbit with a grain of salt because the sailor that told me was not a submariner himself.
More people than the Commanding Officer and Executive Officer would know their position, though. Whoever is the French equivalent of Officer of the Deck and the on-duty navigator would need to know their position. But yeah, there are times/situations where the position of the boat is MUCH more closely held - and that may be all the time on French ballistic missile submarines.
Was gonna say, how the fuck does your navigator work without knowing where he is?
Things that didn't happen in "my reality" include the Ferguson race riots, San Bernadino shooting, the shooting at the heavy metal concert in France (?), the Mediterranean immigration crisis, and Trump becoming the Republican front runner. We were on pre-deployment work ups and then deployment. We were lucky to get a batch of sports scores.
I guess it depends on the mission and the command's digression.
Most humans die due to a virus and cities are left 99% empty. There reaches a point where all the rats flee the city (having eaten all the food they can) and arrive in endless waves at the protagonist's home.
I personally need that kind of "off time" from the constant connectivity, and I thoroughly enjoy it.
Photos here if anyone is interested http://theroadchoseme.com/the-dempster-highway-fall
As an adult I've been taking week long cruises where I force myself to almost entirely disconnect. They've been "well" timed the last few years that world seems stranger (and probably worse) almost every time I return, and I'm not sure I'd recommend that sort of strange to kid me.
One year a lot of staff at my employer (including myself) were laid off and returned to a lot of recruiter emails. Another a close relative was deeply sick. Last year included the drama of returning to hectic airports due to the 737 MAX crisis. This year we were the last ship out before Quarantine and the last ship back, FLL was even more of a mess than after the 737 MAX crisis because it was still full of spring breakers and people who had expected to leave on cruise ships with now canceled vacation plans, few places to stay, and a lot of new unplanned headaches.
We had some warning: they added temperature checks prior to departure, and we were on High levels of handwashing and sanitizing, reminiscent (if not worse) than the one year we sailed during the middle of the cruise ship Noravirus panic or the couple years of increased Zika concern. But still, you don't expect things to escalate in a week anywhere nearly as quick as they did. Not all of us take the excuse to entirely disconnect so we weren't entirely isolated from news like a submarine might be either, but even the difference between reading random NYT headlines versus your personal FB timeline is huge these days.
Not active actively learning about the tragedy as it unfolded made learning about it later feel very disconnected. Sort of like hearing about a destructive event from history rather than a current event. I’m sure, though, this experience was very different for those who had some connections to the region and were more personally impacted by the aftermath.
Some friends and I went on a long hike, over an earthen dike and back into the woods for the day, well out of site of the main camp.
Late afternoon coming back, we started seeing smoke from the general direction of the camp. Cresting the dike we saw a huge grass/brush fire ripping through the heart of the camp and scouts and leaders running around like ants, moving tents and vehicles, and trying to beat the fire out with towels. It did no good.
Turns out someone had been playing with their campfire, it got into some dry grass, and with a high wind took off extremely fast, running right through the camp and out into the trees. We missed it all but the finale. The others at our camp had already moved our stuff to safety.
(off topic I know but the event was pretty dramatic)
I'd think that the staff would question "all sports are cancelled, everywhere" without follow-up questions. UNLESS someone is just making up scores for an imaginary league that's being played.
That'd be an elegant solution ... and a FASCINATING story to uncover someday (or write up, as fiction)
Real sports might not work this way, but there is an imaginary sport whose virus-immune atheletes continue to compete even now. Jelle's Marble Runs [1] is a Youtube channel that hosts marble races in Olympic or Fomula One fashion, complete with TV-style animations and commentary.
It's all for fun, of course, but it is an interesting look at sports without sports, in a sense.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYJdpnjuSWVOLgGT9fIzL0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUEDZmOCqa0
(not affiliated)
While subs sometimes run silent, at least the United States ones still receive communication while doing so via VLF and even ELF. ELF at a few characters per minute can still communicate enough to have them come up just enough to to be optimal for VLF and receive whatever info. I think informing the ships about a highly contagious virus would probably rank up there with very important information.
I'm no military expert but if I had a bunch of guys in subs with finite supplies I might want to communicate "hey, maybe implement mild rationing because when you guys come home we might send you right back out after we send heavily sanitized stores out to you that you shouldn't open for a week or so.
- [1] https://thediplomat.com/2020/03/covid-19-cases-reported-on-b...
I'm lucky enough to have a backyard, in which I've been spending a lot of time lately.
Apparently kids in arctic regions receive “sunbathing” sessions in a dark room with UV lamps for this reason. I’ve been thinking to replicate it but haven’t been able to find much technicalities in it...
It's not a problem if you're active though.
(I was lucky enough to be in a rating where I was on periscope every now and again, so I had that bit of extra 'view'.)
I am pretty sure they have video games in a submarine these days.
You find other escapes - I bought my own laptop at the Exchange and taught myself Linux from the install CD up on one deployment.
If you're senior enough, you get your own rack. Perks :)
And once you're off watch, there's routine to do but after that you have your own music, games if you like, movie nights (voting gets weird sometimes), read, we even made up a Stellar Conquest type game once, played out on paper, one turn per watch rotation.
The family thing could be a big deal but I was already pretty estranged from my very small number of relatives, so wasn't much for me.
YMMV.
https://www.quora.com/Does-a-Navy-submarine-have-a-distincti...
https://paulamrozowicz.com/2015/02/10/submarine-life-what-i-...
https://nos.nl/liveblog/2328775-deel-bemanning-nederlandse-o...
I even think there are some countries where they still don't know anything (Brazil?).
The point is that I have lived up to 6 months in wilderness without any human contact. In Kodiak 1996 I occasionally listened to BBC shortwave, but nothing of interest ever happened so I soon forgot about it.
There is some fundamental issue that needs to be fixed. Maybe they should have sign on the moon, "NOTHING HAS HAPPENED, just take it easy".
But yeah, tldr they are trained to find a nuclear apocalypse when they resurface.
Goodness -- I already thought 'submariner' might be the world's worst job and this clinches it.