Word: sonar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...military program on antisubmarine warfare. This fiscal year the U.S. allotted $9,000,000 worth of aid to Latin American navies (v. $3,000,000 to $4,000,000 annually prior to the buildup), will spend $5,000,000 to train crews. Latin navies have been supplied with no sonar-equipped destroyer escorts, destroyers, minesweepers and subs under the program, and plans call for 18 more in the next few years. Argentina (which, like Brazil, has a modernized, British-built aircraft carrier) is organizing its own sub-hunting task force...
...article of war, her men learned to hide her under water layers where sharp changes of temperature would foul enemy sonar; they practiced with the Navy's new, very low-frequency radio gear with which they could receive messages from 6,000 miles away without resurfacing. They became adept at using Polaris' SINS (Ships Inertial Navigation System), the mare's nest of gyros and electronic equipment that locates George Washington on a precise spot on the globe so that she can dial infinitely accurate directions into her missiles. There were star-tracking periscopes and radiometric sextants...
...which have made the antisub weapons of World War II as obsolete as blunderbusses. Non-nuclear submarines, depending on storage batteries for underwater propulsion, can move at full speed for only a few miles, then have to slow down to a walk to save electricity. A destroyer that makes sonar contact can hover over such a sub for hours, dropping slow-sinking depth charges. But the nuclear submarines-called "nukes"-can cruise underwater for weeks at top speed. When a destroyer makes sonar contact with one of them, it must attack instantly or its nimble prey will dodge and speed...
ASROC, developed by Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. under the direction of the Naval Ordnance Test Station, can attack a submerged submarine almost as soon as it is detected by sonar. The boxlike launcher on the destroyer contains eight missiles. A digital computer, with superhuman speed, notes the roll, pitch, course and speed of the ship and the speed and direction of the wind...
Best Moment. From the sonar the computer gets the distance, bearing, depth, course and speed of the submarine. It combines all these factors and tells the launcher to point accordingly. When the destroyer commander decides that the best moment has come, he fires one or more missiles. The submarine does not know that it is being attacked until the missile hits the water. The Navy, which plans to put ASROC in 150 ships, will not tell its top range; in fact, the range is determined by the effectiveness of sonar, not by the power of the missile's rocket...