Is Iran using trained dolphins for kamikaze attacks on American vessels near the Strait of Hormuz? The question – which seems to have come out of some Hollywood B-movie script – was asked yesterday at a press conference by Secretary of War, Peter Hegseth, who was alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, General Dan Caine.
The military man even joked about the statement, citing an image from the comedy Austin Powers: “It’s like sharks with laser beams, isn’t it?”, he sneered. But Hegseth ended up leaving a doubt in the air: “I cannot confirm or deny that we [os EUA] we don’t have the ‘kamikaze dolphins’, but I can confirm that they [o Irã] They don’t,” he said, without making his answer too long.
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But where did this information come from? At the end of last month, a report by The Wall Street Journal on Iran’s strategy to close the Strait listed all the possibilities, in particular the installation of mines to impede the flow of commercial and military ships – and included the use of trained dolphins.
The text was reminiscent of a report made by the BBC in the early 2000s, which spoke of Iran having purchased dolphins trained for military operations from the Soviet Union. The weapons ranged from harpoons placed on animals to explosives to target ships considered enemies or suspects.
But the Americans are considered the pioneers in this type of training. The US Navy has invested since the 1960s in the so-called Navy Marine Mammal Program, which trains bottlenose dolphins and sea lions in California to detect, locate, mark and retrieve objects in ports, coastal areas and the open ocean.
The explanation is that dolphins have the most sophisticated natural sonar known to science, meaning that mines and other potentially dangerous objects on the ocean floor — which are difficult to detect with electronic sonar — can be easily found by dolphins.
NBC reported in 2002 that the program received US$14 million in funding per year and that it had financial support from the Pentagon until 2020.
Fact or fiction?
In addition to evidence of the use of dolphins for surveillance in the Vietnam War in the early 1970s and by Bahrain in the Tanker War in 1987, a famous photo of the K-Dog dolphin jumping out of the water near Sergeant Andrew Garrett in the Persian Gulf in March 2003 became famous. At the time, the animals were being used to clear mines ahead of coalition ships during the US-led invasion of Iraq.
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In 2013, the American media reported the story of two dolphins having detected an artifact on the seabed in California that turned out to be a practically intact Howell torpedo, one of the US Navy’s first self-propelled torpedoes.
So the answer is yes, dolphins have been trained and used for military purposes for decades. But there is not enough evidence that they could be used to blow up ships. This still seems to belong to fiction, as in the 1973 film “The Day of the Dolphin”, which tells the story of extremists with a plan to blow up a ship containing the US president. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols and Oscar-winning actor George C. Scott, it was a huge box office failure.
