NUKE-GUARDING DOLPHINSDolphins Guard U.S. Nukes

Published 28 January 2022

Despite all the technological advancements warfare has seen in the last century, the U.S. Navy demonstrates that sometimes, nature offers intriguing options – like using dolphins to protect the waters around Bangor, Washington, which is the largest single nuclear weapons site in the world.

Despite all the technological advancements warfare has seen in the last century, the U.S. Navy proves that, sometimes, the natural option does the job just right.

As Military.com recently reported, the Navy has trained dolphins and sea lions since 1967 for various military applications like mine clearing, force protection, and recovery missions under the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program. Dolphins deployed as early as the Vietnam War and as recently as the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Based at Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, animals in the program train in San Diego Bay, and that training has allowed the Navy to contribute more than 1,200 open scientific publications discussing the animals’ health, physiology, sensory systems, and behavior to the body of academic literature on them.

Pandora Report notes that they continue to serve an important mission at home, including defending the waters around Bangor, Washington, which is the largest single nuclear weapons site in the world. This stockpile contains about 25 percent of the U.S. 9,962 nuclear warheads and has done so since 2010.

Information about the program was only declassified in the 1990s, and the United States remains the only known country to have such a program currently. The Soviets trained dolphins for similar harbor protection missions, though their program status remained in limbo after the USSR collapsed. Russia possibly sold the animals to Iran in 2000, according to Military.com. The article concludes with, “Russia is said to have been looking to update its training program, and may even have used them in Syria.”

The U.S. military, particularly the Air Force, has publicly struggled with disciplinary and oversight issues at sites tasked with guarding nuclear weapons, including the 2007 incident in which six AGM-129 ACM cruise missiles were flown over the United States on a B-52H heavy bomber.  USAF Maj. Gen. Michael Carey, then head of the 20th Air Force- the United States’ main nuclear ICBM strike force, was relieved of his duties after a drunken escapade in a Moscow Mexican restaurant while leading a high-level delegation’s trip to meet their Russian nuclear counterparts.

“The Navy’s marine mammals, however, remain stalwart guardians of the U.S. most sensitive weapons and vigilant companions as they continue to sniff out mines and other munitions, including a rare 19th century Howell torpedo discovered off the coast of Coronado, CA in 2013,” Pandora Report writes.

You can check out the archived version of the Navy’s “A Brief History of the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program” here.