CFS Shelburne

Canadian Forces Station Shelburne

Top secret SOSUS site

Closed March 1995

Photographs of Memorial

Shelburne Shelburne County Nova Scotia

Located at Royal Canadian Legion Branch 63

Canadian Forces Station (CFS) Shelburne was established during the ColdWar as a top-secret SOSUS listening post to track Soviet submarine movements in the North Atlantic Ocean. The ColdWar period was from the late 1940s to about 1990.
When the ColdWar 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. InApril 1999 the park ownership was transferred to the South West Shore Development Agency.

Photographed on 19 November 2002

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…
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus.htm

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…
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus2.htm

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…
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_25/sosus2.htm

South West Shore Development Authority
http://www.swsda.com/

Shelburne Film Production Centre
http://www.swsda.com/direction.cfm