The court immediately lifted limits on the Navy exercises now being held 12 miles off the Southern California coast, in a victory for the outgoing Bush administration. But the decision doesn't bind the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama to follow the same policy. Another set of Navy exercises is scheduled for February.

Saying the court should defer to the military, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that the Navy needs to train its crews to detect modern, silent submarines, and it cannot be forced to turn off its sonar when whales are spotted nearby.

"The public interest in conducting training exercises with active sonar under realistic conditions plainly outweighs" the concerns voiced by environmentalists, he said, speaking for a five-justice majority. This "does not strike us as a close question," he added.

Environmentalists contend that the sonar has a possible deafening effect on the whales. Roberts questioned whether whales have indeed been harmed by sonar. He said the Navy had been operating off the California coast for 40 years "without a single documented sonar-related injury to any marine mammal."

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmentalist groups strongly disagreed. They said studies conducted around the world have shown the piercing underwater sounds cause whales to flee in panic or to dive too deeply. Whales have been found beached in Greece, the Canary Islands and in the Bahamas after sonar was used in the area, and necropsies showed signs of internal bleeding near the ears.

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