Shelburne
Shelburne County
Nova Scotia

Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Shelburne was established during 
the Cold War as a top-secret SOSUS listening post to track Soviet
submarine movements in the North Atlantic Ocean.  The Cold War period 
was from the late 1940s to about 1990.  When the Cold War ended the
 nuclear submarine threat diminished, and CFS Shelburne was closed in
 March 1995. 

The land and buildings of the former military site were transferred to 
local civilian control through the Shelburne Park Development Agency.  
In April 1999 the park ownership was transferred to the South West
 Shore Development Agency. 

SOSUS SOund SUrveillance System 
With the onset of the Cold War (in the late 1940s) and the 
growing danger of a Soviet submarine force based on the best of 
German World War Two technology, the application of underwater sound 
specifically to anti-submarine warfare became a top priority. 
By early 1950, the U.S. Navy had come to believe that 
Soviet submarines posed the greatest threat to the United States... 
Born of a three-way marriage of early Cold War strategic necessity, 
World War Two progress in underwater acoustics, and an extraordinary 
engineering effort, the U.S. Navy's pioneering Sound Surveillance System 
– SOSUS – became a key, long-range early-warning asset for protecting 
the United States against the threat of Soviet ballistic missile submarines 
and in providing vital cueing information for tactical, deep-ocean, 
anti-submarine warfare... 
     

History of SOSUS posted 30 April 2005 
The first NAVFAC built by the Caesar program was commissioned in 
September 1954 at Ramey Air Force Base in northwestern Puerto Rico. 
Before the end of the year, similar stations were in operation at Grand 
Turks and San Salvador in the Bahamas, and by late 1957, additional 
NAVFACs had been established at Bermuda, Shelburne (Nova Scotia), 
Nantucket, Cape May, Cape Hatteras, Antiqua, Eleuthera, and Barbados... 
     

Undersea Warfare First-Generation Installations 
The primary threat against which SOSUS was originally designed was 
snorkeling Soviet diesel submarines at the surface, and the system's key 
technical characteristics – such as frequency coverage – were established 
accordingly.  Fortunately, the resulting capability proved even more effective 
against deep-running Soviet nuclear-powered submarines when the first of 
these went operational in 1958...