Not only is North Korea
building a submarine
capable of firing ballistic missiles, the hermit kingdom also appears to be training military dolphins to do its underwater bidding.
New satellite images obtained by the United States Naval Institute (USNI), a non-profit, appear to reveal dolphin pens off the coast of Nampo, a naval base and port city in South Pyongan Province. The apparent animal pens are floating between a shipyard and a coal loading pier, with naval units based nearby.
Satellite images suggest a dolphin training program has existed at Nampo since at least October 2015,
USNI reported
, adding that the dolphins appear to be bred at a second site, on the edge of town, which has existed since October 2016. The program may be part of Kim Jong Un’s broader modernization of North Korea’s navy, USNI reported.
What makes the animals so useful is their sensory and diving capabilities. A dolphin’s natural sonar is superior to man-made devices and they can be trained to hunt for mines, recover equipment and stop hostile swimmers and divers.
USNI reported that it is possible that the animal pens in the satellite images are actually fish farms, which are increasingly common in North Korea, but they look different than those in other areas of the country.
North Korea would not be the first nation to try to weaponize dolphins.
The U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program has been training bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions since the 1960s, but it was only in the early 1990s that the program was declassified.
Canada does not use aquatic animals in its military operations and apparently has no plans to do so,
The Canadian Press reported
after Canadian soldiers got a chance, in 2011, to train with bomb-detecting dolphins during a U.S. military exercise off the coast of British Columbia.
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, navy dolphins helped U.S. forces clear anti-ship mines and underwater booby traps planted in the port of Umm Qasr by Saddam Hussein’s forces.
In 2016 the Russian military spent $33,750 to
purchase five bottlenose dolphins
. Of course, Russia refused to say at the time what it planned to do with the dolphins, but the country’s military has a history of training marine mammals.
The Soviet Union had a dolphin unit at a seaport near Sevastopol in Crimea, but when it collapsed, the training facility was placed under the control of Ukraine. The dolphin program was reportedly restarted in 2012, and when Crimea was annexed by Russia in 2014 the Russian military assumed control of the training facility.
A
declassified 1976 report by the CIA
notes that the Soviet Union launched its marine mammal training program in response to the success of the U.S. one.
The document also notes the exceptional capabilities of dolphins and other marine mammals, which have been trained to locate objects, place packages on moving targets, and deliver objects to submerged divers.
“Marine mammals can perform operational tasks which are well beyond even a trained frogman’s capabilities. A man with swim flippers can maintain a speed of four to five knots for several minutes in quiet water; a dolphin can cruise at five to six knots for several hours and sprint to a speed of 15 to 20 knots for several minutes,” the report says.
“Animals could be trained to attack a magnetic package to a submarine which could record information, transmit a tracking signal or explode.”
In fact,
according to a 2017 study
, a lack of hands may be the only thing holding dolphins back from world domination.
Despite the apparent success of marine mammal programs, the use of animals in military operations remains controversial.
Animal-rights groups have criticized the U.S. military for putting dolphins in harm’s way. Dolphins are big enough to set off a mine by accident, although the navy insists the animals never get close enough to the explosives to detonate them.
With files from The Canadian Press and National Post Staff |