red, october

Stumbled across this little anecdote this morning, somewhere down the click-hole: … the armed forces of Sweden, for over a decade in the 1980s were bombing the living daylights out of their coasts because they were certain that what they heard through their acoustic sensors in the water were Soviet submarines. Millions of dollars, bombs, and efforts were spent to combat this insurgency. To verify that these sounds were indeed submarines, they also used SONAR imaging – where they saw one submarine splitting up into two, then into four, and then rejoining into one once again. Their military engineers were instructed to spend their efforts to build models of how these super-sophisticated submarines of the Soviets worked, and potentially replicate this technology.Much later, spurred by the end of the Cold War not leading to these alleged submarines disappearing, and Russian president Boris Yeltsin denying the deployment of any submarines, the Swedish armed forces approached ecologists…