SOSUS: Spying on Soviet Submarines

hello everyone welcome back to another episode of megaprojects this one is all about well sosis i did look up how you say this there wasn't a lot of information my pronunciation dictionary let me down so it might be sos u.s but that is a massive mouthful so i'm going with sosus let's set a precedent here but before we get started i will say that this video is brought to you by surf shark safety and security online are super important and you could protect yourself online with surf shark get 83 percent off in three months for free that's a pretty fantastic deal through the link in the description below and let's jump in because as outrageous cold war spying escapades go this is a pretty good one the sound surveillance system sosus was an american initiative that deployed an underwater listening system intended to track soviet submarines initially set up in the atlantic it eventually spread and was later installed in the pacific by placing hydrophones that's an underwater microphone if you couldn't guess on the ocean floor the americans and most likely the british were able to track soviet activity across the atlantic ocean this was a practice that went on for decades and only fully came to light in 1991 after the fall of the ussr although by that point it had been an open secret for some time this also led to some tantalizing stories of how soviet submarines who had assumed they had evaded detection were being tracked closely by american submarines without them knowing and if that doesn't sound like a great setup for a movie we don't know what is we are waiting hollywood as you might imagine even after declassification there is still plenty of mystery surrounding this project that as far as we know is actually still ongoing [Music] the detection of submarines has always traditionally been through the use of sonar which works by sending pulses of sound waves through the water and then measuring how long they take to hit an object and then bounce back to the transmitter where they're rather nicely displayed on a screen that we could read although i've looked at sonar sonar screens and unless you know how to read there's like where's that it's just this weird gray shadow several animals use a form of sonar dolphins bats and apparently shrews which is news to me for the first human though we need to go back over 500 years to jack of all trades leonardo da vinci who found that by placing a tube in water and then putting your ear to said tube you could detect vessels in the water close by leonardo da vinci was a total legend the first time we see stationary hydrophones placed in water came during world war one with the work of jay warren horton whose rudimentary hydrophones were first tested off the coast of nahunt in massachusetts and who was in the process of laying more in the irish sea when peace was declared so not a great deal happened on the sonar front from the end of world war one to the outbreak of world war ii so they didn't have to wait very long a really short period in between those two massive international bloodsheds but once the world found itself in the grip of global war once again nations around the world kicked their sonar capabilities into overdrive [Music] amid the bedlam that was world war ii some quite extraordinary scientific discoveries were made some like the atomic bomb made killing even easier while others like radar synthetic rubber and even the full potential of penicillin have had wide-ranging benefits ever since the conclusion of the conflict so world war ii apparently totally worth it not really relax another discovery perhaps not quite as dramatic but important nonetheless was the discovery of sound fixing and ranging channels or so far these are naturally occurring channels underwater approximately a thousand meters 3 300 feet down where the speed of sound is at its minimum meaning sound can travel vast distances before dissipating to give you a very basic example remember as children how you'd build those uh two cups on the piece of string cat well this is a little bit similar although it's under water in the distances can be hundreds of miles apart so i guess don't try that one at home this was discovered separately by maurice ewing and j lamar werzel at columbia university and leonid breshowski at lebedev physics institute in moscow in the 1940s but large scale testing didn't happen until 1944 when ewing and warzol hung a hydrophone from a ship while a second vessel 1 700 kilometers away set off an explosive charge the effect was even better than had been [Music] anticipated the carnage that the german u-boats had inflicted during world war ii showed the world just how devastatingly effective these monsters creeping through the depths could be as the us and ussr began their marathon arms race the numbers of submarines on both sides absolutely exploded by the end of the 1950s the united states was preparing to introduce its first submarine armed with submarine-launched ballistic missiles uss george washington with its 16 polaris a1 missiles entered service in 1959 and it's probably fair to assume that the americans knew the soviets were not very far behind and when i say not very far behind i mean really they were at almost exactly the same time the soviet k-19 submarine was completed in 1960 and suffered a complete loss of coolant to its main reactor on its maiden voyage only the heroic efforts of the crew who were able to construct a temporary coolant system managed to avert a complete nuclear meltdown however the contamination on board k19 had been extensive and within two weeks eight crew members had died within two years that number had reached 22. in true soviet style the cause of death was not recorded as radiation poisoning but rather down to astheno-vegetative syndrome mental disorder because of course it was but the crew of the k-19 were under no illusions of what had happened and gave their cursed submarine a new nickname hiroshima the oceans were becoming an even more dangerous place and with the introduction of ballistic missiles that could be fired from anywhere on the planet both sides were eager to gain any advantage that they could and here's an advantage that you can gain right now affordable access to an amazing vpn look imagine yourself like a russian submarine do you want the entire western world to know all of your passwords or everywhere that you go well probably not definitely not that's where surfshark comes in it has hacklock which searches databases for your passwords which sounds like a bad thing but no no no surf shark are the good guys they find it and they'll let you know you change your password and boom you're back in the warm comfort of safety and while you're in that warm comfort of safety maybe you're like let me watch some netflix but what's this you want to watch the hobbit what a brilliant movie but what's that that favorite movie your favorite movie maybe it's the hobbit maybe it's something else hopefully something else it's only available in the uk but you live in alaska terrible but surf shark will fix that right up boom sneaky now you're in the uk through the magic of vpn technology and then you're like oh the hobbit was great i want to go to new zealand to see those little hobbit houses but what's this you're getting prices that are really too high for flight that's probably because you live in a rich country while flip it over to some other country where things are less expensive and boom maybe you get some cheaper flights you never know surf shark is totally unlimited so if you want to download the hobbit in raw ak just go for it 30 days money back you don't like it get 83 offered three months for free through the link in the description below or just use the code mega and now let's go find those soviet rascals the origins of sosus began in 1949 with a set of recommendations from a study group known as project hartwell which had been tasked with researching anti-submarine warfare they concluded that the us should spend 10 million equivalent to about 107 million dollars in 2019 annually to build and maintain a vast array of hydrophones that could take advantage of the sound superhighways of these so far channels a series of projects then got underway some of which actually remain rather mysterious even to this day project jezebel explored the use of low frequency analysis and recording using a low frequency analyzer and recorder which confusingly uses the same acronym lofart to give a visual representation in real time of frequencies picked up from the boys in the atlantic ocean this was done using att's sound spectrograph which had originally been developed for speech analysis but was now modified to analyze low frequency underwater sounds basically these can provide a permanent visual record of sound energy from a particular point nowadays you can hold a loafer in your hand but back in the 1950s these low for graham writers were enormous contraptions this was greatly expanded upon by the slightly wordy ansq-28 passive on the directional jezebel low-far sona boy which began to be used in 1956 as a way of transmitting data from boys directly to the aircraft above by using bell telephone laboratories time delay correlation users were able to fix the position of a submarine or vessel using two or more boys a technique known as correlation detection and ranging or codar and oh boy could there be more acronyms in this video [Music] between the 2nd and the 19th of january 1952 the british cable layer alert worked to install the first experimental yet fully operational sosis elements off the island of ellisira in the bahamas this included a 304 meter thousand foot long array the wiring system that connects it all completes with 40 hydrophones laid on the ocean floor 438 meters down initial tests with a target submarine proved successful and a further nine arrays were ordered and laid in the western north atlantic in 1954 10 more arrays were added but this time spreading out with three in the atlantic six off the western coast of the u.s and close to hawaii these arrays and their hydrophones needed to be connected to facilities on shore where a lofar machine was located this was done with a multi-pair wire but with the maximum length of 241 kilometers it meant that the entire system needed to remain relatively close to land the arrays were often positioned on continental slopes or seamounts at a section where deep sound channels typically converged what was first placed in the late 1950s worked but was quickly improved upon over the coming decades in what came to be known as the caesar phases and included the installation of multiplexed coaxial cable and major upgrades in the shore facilities which included the digital spectrum analysis dsa which measures the power of the spectrum coming from a signal speeding up the accuracy of detection further cable upgrades were placed in 1972 and in 1994 sosus prepared for the 21st century when its original cables were replaced with fiber optics the extent of which u.s authorities were able to successfully track soviet submarines isn't always clear without knowing the exact number of vessels officially operating in an area it's difficult to get an exact read on just how successful sosis was but we do know the first time that it successfully picked up a soviet submarine on the 6th of july 1962 nav fact barbados was able to track a soviet submarine close to norway as it moved through the greenland iceland united kingdom gi uk gap it became known as contact number 27103 there are some stories of a us submarine then quietly following behind undetected but unfortunately that can't be verified in 1968 sosus tracked its first victor and charlie class soviet submarines and in 1974 a delta class submarine was also tracked for the first time perhaps one of the most extraordinary uses of sosus came in the build-up to project azorea now we've done an entire video on the subject on megaprojects before so i don't want to say too much on this topic gear if you want to find more about project azorian and you should because this is wildly impressive and cool you should go check out that particular video but remember i need that sweet watch time so finish watching this one first please project his orion was the barely believable tale of how the u.s successfully located and then tried to raise a sunken soviet submarine the k-109 this was a nuclear-powered submarine that had disappeared in 1968 and despite extensive searching soviet authorities weren't able to locate it but the americans did and well you can probably guess how they did it by using the sosis system they were able to pinpoint the location of the underwater explosion that had ultimately doomed the submarine as i said what came next is barely believable but the americans essentially built a ship that could pick up a submarine and hide it inside it but let's not get sidetracked for more on project azorian as i said check out the video also howard hughes is involved so is probably going to be a bit crazy it is sosis was also used to locate two u.s submarines that had sunk the uss thresher in 1963 and the uss scorpion in 1968. you'd be amazed how many nuclear submarines have sunk over the years which is currently 11. while the system worked in that it could detect submarines and large objects in the water it came with numerous problems when sosis began operation those working on it just had no idea what a soviet submarine sounded like this was still a long way from the signature library of soviet submarine acoustics that was later compiled though scanning with the lofar were doing so pretty much blind and there were plenty of vessels in the water at that stage only after the cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the u.s set up a blockade around the caribbean island did the traffic in the area reduce and those listening through sosus began to hear unusual underwater signatures which were soon deemed to be soviet submarines then there was the question of secrecy and the rather bizarre distrust between the surveillance community and the navy the information gathered by sosus was rarely shared widely with the naval fleet in the vicinity while the u.s navy for some time believed that their submarines couldn't be heard by sosus when the system successfully picked up the uss george washington in 1961 the navy began the process of quietening their submarines in response lastly and perhaps most dangerously the lack of communication between those involved sometimes led to mistaken identity something which happened in 1962 and 1963 when u.s submarines deployed on classified missions close to the soviet coast were picked up by sosus which then relayed the incidents up the chain of command as they couldn't be sure what they had heard though nothing ever came of these incidents it did expose the frailties of the sosa system when combined with a lack of communication [Music] sosus was officially declassified in 1991 but by this point it had been an open secret for some time the immediate need for sosus disappeared almost overnight and the number of people involved in it came tumbling down from a reported 4 000 during the 1980s to just a thousand by 2010. the number of shore installations has also been drastically reduced but a presence remains on the east and west coast of the united states as well as one further station out in the pacific ocean compared with other technological developments that occurred after world war ii sosis might not sound particularly impressive but the fusing of natural elements in our world with modern technology was groundbreaking it's a service that certainly has its limitations and how effective it is at picking up modern submarines which are considerably quieter is another matter but until we develop satellites that can scan underwater it's likely sosus in some form at least will continue to keep its ear to the ground or rather the water so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did smash that like button below don't forget to subscribe also please do check out our fantastic sponsor surf shark who i'm linking to below and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 246,417

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Id: _JUniYnTE7Y

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021