Is Russia amassing a dolphin navy?
It wouldn’t be the the first attempt at militarized marine mammals
The Russian ministry of defense just secured its newest military personnel: five dolphins with an aptitude for “motor activity” and “perfect teeth.”
The news that the dolphins, bought for about $5,200 each, are headed to a dolphinarium in Crimea has raised a cetacean specter of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the US were locked in a prolonged contest for technological and military superiority — a battle that extended to weaponizing marine mammals. A fins race, if you will. (Sorry.)
The US Navy launched its top-secret Marine Mammal Program in 1960, intending to study dolphins’ swimming skills so engineers could glean details that might improve boats and submarines. They soon realized that dolphins, with their ultra-sensitive underwater hearing and “echolocation,” had a unique ability to locate objects in the deep, like underwater mines or enemies encroaching in US waters.
So, right about the time Flipper was bottle-nosing his way into the hearts of America, the navy was scaling up a classified dolphin training program. Within a few years, some of them were combat-ready, and in 1965, the Navy sent dolphins to Vietnam to perform underwater surveillance and guard US boats from enemy swimmers. (Rumors swirled that the dolphins were trained to kill, but the Navy repeatedly denied this.)
Oceans away, at a dolphinarium in the Crimean city of Sevastapol the Soviets were training their own team of combat dolphins to perform kamikaze-style maneuvers, detonating mines against the hulls of enemy ships or attacking enemy frogmen with harpoons mounted to their backs. Russian trainers said the dolphins were taught to distinguish the sound of an enemy submarine propellor from a Soviet one.
With the end of the Cold War, the combat dolphin programs on both sides of the Iron Curtain slowed or stopped. Some of the Soviet dolphins were used for therapy with autistic Ukrainian kids and eventually sold to Iran.
In the US, Congress had repealed part of the Marine Mammal Act, allowing the Navy to capture wild dolphins for military purposes, and by the mid-1980s the program hit a peak, with a 103 dolphins. Six dolphins were deployed to the Persian gulf in 1986 to protect US ships and escort Kuwaiti oil tankers.
But, eventually, the Navy scaled back the program, and by the mid-1990s, after mass public outcry, it sent some of the dolphins to sanctuaries. It declassified the program, announcing it would keep only 70 dolphins. (It currently has at least 85.)
It’s unclear, though, whether those numbers could go up in light of the recent news from Russia.
When Russia annexed parts of Crimea in 2014, it took over Sebastapol — and its dolphinarium. The Ukrainian government had run a dolphin combat program at the facility, at one point training dolphins to attack enemies with guns mounted to their heads, but had recently announced it would shutter the program.
“The combat dolphin program in the Crimean city of Sevastopol will be preserved and redirected towards the interests of the Russian Navy,” wrote the state-run news agency RIA Novosti, after the annexation.
An employee at the facility, who requested anonymity, told RIA Novosti: “The oceanarium’s engineers are developing new instruments for new applications to boost the operational efficiency of the dolphins underwater.”
The Russian Navy has remained mum about plans for the newest dolphins in its arsenal, but that could be where the “perfect teeth” come in.
