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Comment by sm001 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

> But sosus was not really about listening.

Being able to hear and identify any and all Russian submarines sortieing into the North Atlantic through the GIUK gap was invaluable even without triangulation.

I never heard anyone say "October Missile Crisis." Did you grow up in Cuba or a Cuban American community?

Thanks for sharing. So much yet to learn about this topic.

"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 suspect that ringing up the Kremlin and saying "A Seawolf attack sub right now has an excellent firing solution on your rather expensive ballistic missile submarine, no, I'm not bluffing, these are the co-ordinates, and we would definitely be able to recover it after we sink it given how close it is to our coast and how shallow the seas are. So how about we don't sink your submarine and recover your classified technology, as a sign of good faith, and we talk this out?" might be one way.

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.

My personal favorite of the sub movies is Phantom with Ed Harris, and it gets a little more philosophical. Basically in these kinds of dramas, escalation itself is the enemy: the move that triggers the countermove that triggers the countermove that triggers the war that ends the world

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