These Guards Just Love Fish

By EUGENE LINDEN

If the Navy has its way, the Trident nuclear-submarine base at Bangor, Wash., will soon be guarded by an uncanny underwater-surveillance system. Vastly more powerful than the Navy's most sophisticated sonar, it can identify real threats to the base, distinguishing them from the normal cacophony of noise in the cold, murky waters of Puget Sound. Developed at a cost of nearly $30 million, it can spot and tag intruding divers, making it possible for them to be intercepted, and can outmaneuver any underwater machine. Yet just about the only maintenance required is 20 lbs. of fish a day and an occasional pat. The system, it turns out, is a squadron of dolphins.

The mere idea that the Navy is drafting marine mammals has created a furor. A group of 15 organizations concerned with animal welfare has filed a lawsuit against the Government, charging that moving the dolphins from their homes in warm southern waters to the chilly Puget Sound will endanger the animals. Moreover, one of their former trainers asserts that the Navy has abused the dolphins. Still other critics question the wisdom of entrusting the security of the nation's underwater nuclear arsenal to animals, however clever.

Despite the brouhaha, the Navy is going ahead with its plans to use the dolphins as guards. Thomas LaPuzza, a spokesman for the Naval Ocean Systems ) Center in San Diego, where the dolphins have been trained, refuses to comment on their mission, which is classified, but claims they are highly dependable. A thorough investigation by the federal Marine Mammal Commission cleared NOSC of charges that it had abused dolphins, and Democrat Norman Dicks, a Washington State Congressman who sits on the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, came away from a classified briefing on the project reassured that the animals "are more reliable than anything else we've got for this assignment."

The Navy started training dolphins more than 20 years ago. At first they were given benign missions like retrieving objects from the sea bottom and helping in underwater-rescue efforts. Inevitably, however, it occurred to military planners that the highly intelligent dolphins, which can swim at speeds of up to 26 m.p.h., dive more than 1,000 ft. and find a vitamin capsule while blindfolded, might be turned into underwater patrols.

In the late 1960s at the Naval Undersea Center in Point Mugu, Calif., and then in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, dolphins were trained for duty in the Viet Nam War. In particular, the animals learned to attack objects with barbed darts. The plan was to have dolphins help protect Cam Ranh Bay by sticking darts into enemy divers who approached. Each dart was attached to a spool of tough thread and a float. When surface patrols spotted the float, they could reel in the hooked diver.

The extent to which dolphins were used in the war is classified information, but rumors persist that they killed enemy divers. Point Mugu veterans consider it more probable that the animals helped capture divers alive for interrogation. Upon realizing what the dolphins' mission would be, some of the trainers begged off being part of the final preparation of the animals. Says one: "The whole program was a hideous use of the most benevolent creatures I ever had the chance to know. To the dolphins, it was all games."

According to people once involved in military dolphin projects, the animals will be used in Puget Sound in much the same way as they were in Viet Nam. One probable difference is that the dolphins will simply mark the location of the intruder or ensnare swimmers through some means less brutal than darts. Unless war breaks out, underwater saboteurs at the Trident base are more likely to be antinuclear protesters or animal-rights activists than enemy agents. That raises the bizarre possibility that dolphins might help the Navy arrest dolphin lovers.

Some scientists scoff at the notion that dolphins provide an effective defense against intruders. Says Stephen Leatherwood, a Point Mugu alumnus who subsequently spent ten years with NOSC: "Wouldn't you like to have more reliable protection for your loved one than an animal who one day might decide that it would rather be a dolphin than a soldier?" Leatherwood believes these projects demonstrate capabilities and thus keep research funds flowing, rather than serve any real operational purpose.

Sadly, whether dolphins make good soldiers or not, their use by the military puts them under suspicion. Paranoid governments may feel compelled to kill strange dolphins that suddenly appear in the vicinity of military installations. Says Leatherwood: "Using dolphins raises the question about whether we have the right to involve wild animals of intelligence and perhaps conscience in our most vile and reprehensible activity, warfare."