VIDEO Interview: “You’re killing me”: How whales and dolphins sacrifice for national security

The largest international naval exercise in the world off the waters of Hawaii known as the 2010 Rim of the Pacific or RIMPAC exercise involved 14 nations including South Korea, Thailand, Colombia, Peru and Malaysia with a total of 32 ships, five submarines, more than 170 aircraft and 20,000 personnel.

One of the primary threats the month-long series of exercises were designed to address comes from quiet diesel-engine submarines, which national security experts say North Korea, Iran and other potential adversarial nations possess. The best way to detect something as quiet as a submarine running nearly entirely on battery power – as opposed to a noisy nuclear sub – is with high-intensity active sonar, which sends out pulses of mid-frequency sound as loud as a rocket blast underwater.

The general consensus, with which courts over the past decade have largely agreed, says high-intensity mid-frequency sonar can kill whales and dolphins. The National Marine Fisheries Services – part of the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration – explicitly allows Navy sonar tests and training exercises to result in the deaths of specific numbers of whales and dolphins as long as they have a negligible impact to the population.