Ted Thornhill / The Daily Mail & Bill Gertz / The Washington Times & RT News – 2015-03-19 01:23:29
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2847238/Inside-Russian-bunker-designed-hold-2-700-people-Moscow-struck-nuclear-attack-supplies-two-days.html
In the Event of a Nuclear Attack, Russia Has Built a Bunker for 2,700 People
Ted Thornhill / The Daily Mail
MOSCOW (November 24, 2014) — Have you ever wondered where Russians would go if we dropped nuclear bombs on them?
Thanks to eye-opening pictures provided by Moscow construction worker Mikhail Bratza, we in the West can now see the grim 650-feet underground welcome that 2,700 Russian citizens would receive if nuclear war became reality.
The only problem is that the bunker’s power and water supplies would fail after just two days, leaving refugees with no choice but to venture into the nuclear wasteland their city would have become.
The life support system includes two-foot thick steel reinforced doors, diesel generators, water pumps, chemical and radiation proof suits, gas masks, post-nuclear transport and wooden bunks to sleep on.
Other features of Moscow’s Site 1 include enough non-radioactive water in the tanks for three-liters per person per day, food for three meals a day, automatic fire extinguishers, air-con, 75 toilets and bathroom capacity for 200 people to wash at any one time.
Meanwhile, a gigantic, secret bunker that Albania’s communist regime built underground decades ago to survive a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union or the United States has been opened to the public for the first time.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Edi Rama led visitors, including Western ambassadors, on a tour of the never used 106-room, five-story bunker.
‘We have opened today a thesaurus of the collective memory that presents thousands of pieces of the sad events and life’ under communism,’ Rama said, speaking at the bunker’s 200-seat hall, which was to serve as the meeting place for parliament.
The bunker was built by the late communist dictator Enver Hoxha near Tirana, the capital, in the 1970s to prepare for a possible nuclear attack by ‘American imperialism or Soviet social-imperialism.’ Hoxha, whose regime built up to 700,000 bunkers of different sizes and tunnels all around the country, died in 1985. The communist regime was toppled in 1990.
Rama said the bunker was opened ahead of Albania’s World War II liberation day this month. The government plans to use it as a tourist attraction and an exhibition space for artists.
On display before the bunker, which has been preserved by the military, stood a Soviet-produced Zim-12 luxury car, a gift to Hoxha from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
The bunker, 100-meters (330 feet) underground, houses a museum with pictures and items from World War II and the communist regime. The heavy cement and metal doors are so low that visitors have to bow down to pass through them.
In the small, cold and smelly rooms one can see military equipment used by the communist regime, mainly received from the Soviet Union and China.
Work on the bunker was completed in 1978, when Tirana broke ties with China. Albania had done that with the Soviets in 1962.
Moscow Builds Bunkers against Nuclear Attack
Bill Gertz / The Washington Times
(April 1, 1997) — Russia is continuing a Cold War-era program to build deep underground bunkers, subways and command posts to help Moscow’s leaders flee the capital and survive a nuclear attack, The Washington Times has learned. Among the ambitious projects: a secret subway being built directly to the residence of Russian President Boris Yeltsin outside Moscow.
“The underground construction appears larger than previously assessed,” a CIA report labeled “top secret” reported two weeks ago. “Three decrees last year on an emergency planning authority under Yeltsin with oversight of underground facility construction suggest that the purpose of the Moscow-area projects is to maintain continuity of leadership during nuclear war.”
A copy of the report was obtained by The Washington Times from defense sources. A CIA spokesman declined to comment. Disclosure of the secret multibillion-dollar construction program comes less than two weeks after President Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin agreed in Helsinki to extend the deadline for nuclear arms cuts under the START II treaty because of Russian concerns over “dismantlement costs.”
US officials said the Russian spending on strategic defenses, coupled with ongoing procurement of new strategic missiles and submarines, raises questions about Moscow’s claims not to have funds needed to carry out START II reductions. The outlays also raise new worries among some US officials about whether US aid to Russia is allowing Moscow to spend its money on building new strategic forces and facilities.
“How can the United States be so gullible to accept Russian claims that it doesn’t have the money to comply with START II when it’s made the decision to modernize its forces and build these underground facilities?” asked one US government defense official.
According to the CIA report, construction work is continuing on a “nuclear-survivable, strategic command post at Kosvinsky Mountain,” located deep in the Ural Mountains about 850 miles east of Moscow.
Satellite photographs of Yamantau Mountain, also located about 850 miles east of Moscow in the Urals near the town of Beloretsk, show continued digging at the “deep underground complex” and new construction at each of the site’s above-ground support areas, the CIA stated. Yamantau Mountain means “Evil Mountain” in the local Bashkir langauge.
“The command post at Kosvinsky appears to provide the Russians with the means to retaliate against a nuclear attack,” the CIA report said. “The rationale for the Yamantau complex is unclear.” According to the CIA report, the Russians are building or renovating four complexes within Moscow that would be used to house senior Russian government leaders during a nuclear strike.
A map published in the report showed new subway construction under way from Victory Park Station in Moscow to Mr. Yeltsin’s dacha, some 13 miles west of the Kremlin and about four miles from the Moscow Ring Road. Additionally, the CIA report stated that a bunker for Russian leaders at Voronovo, about 46 miles south of Moscow, is nearly complete.
A second bunker located at Sharapovo, some 34 miles from Moscow, has a special underground subway running directly to it. The subway system for Russian leaders allows for “rapid evacuation of leaders during wartime from Moscow,” the CIA said.
Presumably, the leadership would then be flown to the Yamantau or Kosvinsky complexes. According to the report, Mr. Yeltsin and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin endorsed the construction of the bunkers, subways and command posts, and funding for the Yamantau facility was listed for the first time this year in the Russian federal budget.
Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and author of a new book on Russian nuclear operations, said the continued construction of the Russian strategic defense sites is ominous and cannot be dismissed by US officials as “inertia” from Cold War-era strategic policies.
“It shows they take the threat of nuclear war so seriously that they’re willing to spend scarce resources on it,” Mr. Pry said, adding that he was not familiar with the CIA report. “These things are tying down billions of dollars in rubles that could go into other enterprises the Russians need — for example, providing housing for Russian military officers.” Mr. Pry said Russian press reports say the underground facility at Yamantau Mountain covers an area as large as the Capital Beltway.
The Clinton administration has been providing hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid to Russia to help Moscow dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Despite the aid, the CIA report shows that the Russians are building both defensive and offensive strategic facilities and weapons, including a new type of long-range strategic missile and a new strategic missile submarine.
Russian Defense Minister Igor Rodionov said in February that both the reliability and control of Russian nuclear weapons were in question because of the deterioration of the armed forces, but Pentagon officials have dismissed the statements as posturing by Mr. Rodionov in a bid to boost his budget.
Mr. Pry said the Russian construction program also shows that Russian leaders do not see a diminished threat of nuclear conflict. “This is a manifestation of the Russians’ continued war-fighting attitudes,” Mr. Pry said. “They believe in the idea that you can survive and prevail in a nuclear conflict. These kinds of facilities are designed to survive for weeks and months.”
By contrast, US nuclear protective facilities have been largely shut down. The complex underneath the Greenbriar resort in Virginia was abandoned, along with another facility in Virginia known as Mount Weather, US officials have said.
Moscow Arms against Nuclear Attack
RT News
(July 12, 2010) — Nearly 5,000 new emergency bomb shelters will be built in Moscow by 2012 to save people in case of potential attacks. Moscow authorities say the measure is urgent as the shelters currently available in the city can house no more that half of its population.
In the last 20 years, the area of air-raid defense has been developed little, and the existing shelters have become outdated. Moreover, they are located mostly in the city center, which makes densely populated Moscow outskirts especially vulnerable in the event of a nuclear attack.
In order to resolve the issue, the city has given architects a task to construct a typical model of an easy-to-build shelter that will be located all over the city 10 to 15 meters underneath apartment blocks, shopping centers, sport complexes and parks, as in case of attack people will need to reach the shelters within a minute.
Moscow saw its first mass building of shelters in the 1930s, after which 7,000 of them were constructed. Some of Russia’s metro stations have been built very deep underground so that they could double as air raid shelters.
However, in the early 1990s, many shelters were privatized by commercial firms that used them as warehouses, parking lots, and even restaurants.
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