Navy Sonar System Draws Activists’ Fire

As the U.S. Navy looks to the future, it sees a serious threat from an increasing number of super-quiet, fully armed submarines controlled by potentially hostile Third World countries.

To enhance its ability to detect enemy submarines before they can launch a strike at a U.S. ship or land-based target, the Navy has spent $350 million over the last decade to develop an improved underwater sonar system.

But now, just as the new technology is about to be deployed, environmental activists are protesting that the system’s use of low-frequency, high-decibel sound waves over large undersea areas poses a threat to whales and other sea life. One group is threatening litigation under a federal law requiring the military to minimize the environmental damage it causes.

It is an emotional dispute pitting environmental concerns against national security--with each side charging that the other is crying wolf to justify its ideological view of the world.

The environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, suggest that the Navy is overestimating the global danger posed by belligerent Third World submarines and that the sonar system is unneeded.

A more realistic assessment of the geopolitical scene, the groups say, would not justify the use of an environmentally risky system that was conceived as a way to thwart a much greater threat from the former Soviet Union.

An official with the San Diego chapter of the Audubon Society suggested that as a compromise, the Navy should agree to turn on the system only when the nation faces an immediate threat.

“I fully expect the system would never be used . . . and thus never used to the detriment of the environment,” said Audubon’s Jim Pugh.

Civilian scientists hired by the Navy to review the project’s environmental impact say that the activists are demanding an unreasonable and scientifically impossible level of assurance that not a single sea creature will be ever be harmed by proximity to the Surveillance Towed Array Sensor System (SURTASS).

A more reasonable standard, said Kurt Fristrup, assistant director of bio-acoustic research at Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology, is whether there is any likelihood that the system could disrupt an entire undersea population or habitat. The answer, Fristrup said, is almost assuredly no.

“Maybe there is a species somewhere we haven’t discovered that will behave differently than those we know about, but I think that chance is less than one in a hundred,” Fristrup said.

A $10-million study conducted by Fristrup and other scientists in the waters off California and Hawaii found no significant impact on whales--although Fristrup notes that there is much that science still does not know about larger species of whales, including at what decibel level their hearing is permanently damaged.

The environmentalists are unimpressed by the conclusions of the Navy-financed study and the 400-page environmental impact statement that the system is environmentally benign. At hearings this week in San Diego and Honolulu--home ports for the Pacific Fleet’s attack submarines--the Navy came under a blizzard of criticism.

Blasting the study as too limited in scope and too sweeping in its conclusion, the Natural Resources Defense Council vowed at the San Diego hearing to sue unless the Navy performs additional studies with different methodologies.

One legal challenge to the system has already failed. The Hawaii County Green Party failed to persuade a federal justice in Hawaii last year to block tests off the Kona coast in a region where male humpbacks congregate.

There is no question that the Navy is eager to put the system into place. Like many military procurement programs, it has undergone fits and starts and numerous alterations.

Moreover, Navy officials warn gravely of a submarine arms race with militarily adventuresome nations buying submarines built in Russia, Sweden, Germany and Italy. Although much of the former Soviet fleet is rusting at pier side, Russian shipyards are still building and developing submarines as a kind of cash crop for the destitute nation.

The Russian diesel-driven submarines are thought by military analysts to be particularly stealthy--which is one of their major selling points. By the Navy’s count, 21 Third World nations, including North Korea, Iran, Libya and Pakistan, have a total of 310 submarines, although many of them are older ones and of doubtful military value.

U.S. officials are concerned that a Third World nation might attempt to score a psychological or political victory by attacking an American target. Another use might be in conflict with an American ally, such as the Chinese deployment of submarines three years ago during a confrontation with Taiwan.

In anti-submarine warfare, the ability to hear an adversary is all important. While expensive and controversial, the system is only one of several such Navy projects.

“Undersea warfare remains a tough business where the only acceptable position is one of absolute operational primacy,” Adm. Jay Johnson, chief of naval operations, has said.

Indeed, development of anti-submarine warfare technology, much of it done by California firms, is one of the last growth areas for defense contracting in the post-Cold War world.

Although the exact range of the sonar signals is classified, Navy officials say that it is a sufficient advancement over the range of the current system to justify the expense. The system now in place generally relies on passive sonar listening devices to hear underwater sounds and does not generate sound.

Under the new system, two specially equipped surface ships will be outfitted with acoustic devices dropped into the water from the middle of the ship. Eighteen desk-size sensors dangling on a long cable can emit sounds that--ironically enough--resemble those made by lovesick humpback whales.

When the sound waves hit an object, they bounce back. The advance in the system, officials said, is not so much in the sound emitting apparatus but in the software that will allow computers to filter out clutter and determine whether the object is a potentially unfriendly submarine.

If the Navy and environmentalists are at odds over the future, they also disagree about the past, particularly a 1996 incident in which 12 Cuvier’s beaked whales beached themselves in Greece while NATO naval forces were testing a low-frequency sonar system.

To the environmentalists, the incident shows the fragility of the giant mammals and the potential for severe damage. The Navy retorts that no link was ever found between the sonar tests and the beachings and that the beaked whales have a history of beaching themselves.

The environmentalists have long been concerned about undersea noise pollution. In the mid-1990s a protest was mounted against a plan by researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego to use high-frequency sound waves to look for signs of global warming. Amid controversy, the plan died.

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Sonar Controversy

The Navy says a $350-million sonar system will allow it to detect the undersea presence of a growing number of submarines deployed by potentially hostile nations. But environmentalists say the system will harm whales and other sea life. How the system works:

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Sources: U.S. Navy, Silent Oceans Project, Natural Resources Defense Council