Do submarines kill whales

Answer 1

No, and neither do surface warships. It's a complete and total fallacy created by Enviro-Nazis who have no clue about submarines and whales, as well as their interaction in the open ocean. They go around waving their arms and flags, and getting idiots to donate money to their "cause", which in reality is completely bogus and so out of touch with reality that it's ridiculous.

Money is the driving factor with this bogus argument; Enviro-Nazis know (but the clueless public rarely doesn't) that the Navy and the Government in general cannot respond in a civil courtroom with the actual operations and specifications of submarine and surface ship sonar systems, e.g., how and when they are used, power levels, etc., because that data is highly classified. It's pretty difficult to win an argument in both a civil court or the court of public opinion when your hands are tied and you can't respond. These people are complete and total hypocrites; one recent example is the push for wind energy by putting up hundreds of wind turbines in California near San Francisco and other areas.

The victims from those projects? Eagles, who are protected by the government from being killed, and some of which are endangered, are being killed by wind turbines in numbers that would alarm the average person on the street. Where is the outrage and protests from Enviro-Nazi groups?? They're silent - it's tough for them to protest against something that they championed. In fact, the current "administration" has gone so far as to make it legal for wind farm operators to kill so many eagles per year. This is the kind of hypocrisy I'm speaking of with these people.

Back to Submarines and Whales....

Whales, as well as Dolphins, are constant companions to submerged submarines; the one thing I really miss hearing is the lonely cries from Humpback whale pods, or the "clacking" sound of a sperm whale going after food, which sounds like 2x4's being struck together.

Activists would try and have you believe that an active sonar system in the open ocean is equivalent to putting yourself in a closed room and pumping up the volume on a set of speakers so loud that it would literally kill you. Nice theory for morons who know nothing (which is exactly the type of person they target - the clueless with money), but it's also a total crock of BS. While there's no question the transmission power is very high, it needs to be if the receivers are to pick up any echo from longer ranges, and the longer the range, the more attenutation there is due to the ocean environment (temperature layers, inversions, salinity, water depth, etc.)

Guess where the Navies of the world got the idea to use Sonar in the first place? Whales and Dolphins, who regularly use their own type of Sonar (some use very high frequencies, high enough to set off a torpedo alarm, while others use lower frequencies to communicate with each other over very long distances. Active sonar, when used, is very powerful within a certain range, but it's not as far as you'd think, and the sound is increasingly attenuated by ocean environmental factors as range increases.

Modern submarines rarely, if ever, use active sonar, as it is a dead giveaway to its position; the only reason to use it would be to verify a range to target just prior to shooting a warshot or exercise torpedo to a target, or if you were testing it. In fact, we used to use it so infrequently that it was always hell during watches in Sonar if we knew a test was coming up; everyone wanted to be on the Active Sonar stack when we were going to use it, so it was a competition to see who'd get on the right rotation in order to use it. Sometimes though, it would be whoever needed it for qualification sign-offs. The only time I can ever remember using it in a tactical situation was when we were hunting a Norwegian diesel boat in a fjord during a NATO exercise. Diesel submarines on battery power are arguably the quietest boats in the ocean; that's the first lesson you learn in Sonar school. Active sonar is about the only way to really find them. But even then, you still don't use it often, since using active sonar instantly gives away your position. With modern torpedoes, which have their own active-passive sonar guidance systems, all a boat needs to do is shoot a torpedo in the general direction of the target, and input a guesstimated range. The torpedo will do the rest.

Surface warships rarely use active sonar as well, unless they're actively searching for a submerged target, or just putting up a lot of noise for a sound screen. But whales and dolphins aren't stupid either; if the area gets too noisy, they'll leave, but kill them? We've had them close aboard when using active sonar, and it didn't kill them or stop them from shutting up. Whales aren't bad, but dolphins will come up right next to a boat's bow and start squealing with their own type of sonar, loud enough that if you're not prepared for it, it can really screw up your ears.

In all my time at sea on submarines, I can never once remember any time where we didn't have whales or dolphins around; as I said, they're constant companions to submerged submarines, so much that it's almost like they know what a submarine is.