Word: undersea
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There had never been any period of "phony war" during what came to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Though Donitz's undersea fleet was small -- his 56 U-boats in 1939 included only 22 large oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without warning but also seeded Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship...
...were shut down, and no fatalities were reported. Soviet officials insisted there had been no venting of radiation, thus no threat to people or the environment; Norwegian tests showed no unusual radiation in the area. Nonetheless, the accident dealt another blow to the prestige of the world's largest undersea fleet...
Last week the Bismarck's hulk was discovered some 600 miles west of the Brittany port of Brest by Robert Ballard, the undersea explorer who in 1986 located the wreck of the passenger liner Titanic. As in the search for the Titanic, Ballard, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts, used the unmanned submersible Argo in his Bismarck quest. According to Ballard, the battleship, which lies 15,000 ft. below the surface, is intact, upright and "in an excellent state of preservation" -- a remarkable fact considering that more than 300 shells and torpedoes were fired into...
...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...
...sinking was a sharp blow to the Soviet navy. The prototype sub represented state-of-the-art Soviet design, impressive enough to prompt concern in Washington that U.S. superiority in undersea warfare might be imperiled. The Mike-class vessel was put in service in 1984 and was the only one of its class afloat. Experts believe it was used to test new design and propulsion features. The sinking marked at least the fifth such Soviet loss in 30 years. In the most recent major disaster, a Yankee-class Soviet sub burned and sank in the Atlantic in October 1986. Three...