[twoodfin]

It wasn’t quite 40 years ago, but there’s a line in the film The Hunt for Red October (1990) that explicitly describes SOSUS as a submarine “warning net”. Knowing Tom Clancy, I’d guess there are similar references in the book (1984).

If it was meant to be a secret it wasn’t well-kept.

[garbagecoder]

Script written in 1982. People thought he had access to classified info, but he didn't.[1] He was just using what we now call OSINT. There is a lot more about SOSUS in Red Storm Rising which was only a few years later.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1986/08/12/books/author-of-red-octob...