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SOSUS SOund SUrveillance System
With the onset of the Cold War (in the late 1940s) and the
growing danger of a Soviet submarine force based on the best of
German World War Two technology, the application of underwater sound
specifically to anti-submarine warfare became a top priority.
By early 1950, the U.S. Navy had come to believe that
Soviet submarines posed the greatest threat to the United States...
Born of a three-way marriage of early Cold War strategic necessity,
World War Two progress in underwater acoustics, and an extraordinary
engineering effort, the U.S. Navy's pioneering Sound Surveillance System
– SOSUS – became a key, long-range early-warning asset for protecting
the United States against the threat of Soviet ballistic missile submarines
and in providing vital cueing information for tactical, deep-ocean,
anti-submarine warfare...
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus.htm
History of SOSUS posted 30 April 2005
The first NAVFAC built by the Caesar program was commissioned in
September 1954 at Ramey Air Force Base in northwestern Puerto Rico.
Before the end of the year, similar stations were in operation at Grand
Turks and San Salvador in the Bahamas, and by late 1957, additional
NAVFACs had been established at Bermuda, Shelburne (Nova Scotia),
Nantucket, Cape May, Cape Hatteras, Antiqua, Eleuthera, and Barbados...
http://oceanengineering.blogspot.com/2005/04/history-of-sosus.html
Undersea Warfare First-Generation Installations
The primary threat against which SOSUS was originally designed was
snorkeling Soviet diesel submarines at the surface, and the system's key
technical characteristics – such as frequency coverage – were established
accordingly. Fortunately, the resulting capability proved even more effective
against deep-running Soviet nuclear-powered submarines when the first of
these went operational in 1958...
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus2.htm
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