nuclear-news

Soviet Union’s secret nuclear weapons bunkers in Poland

Secret Soviet Bunkers in Poland Hid Nuclear Weapons, Live Science, By Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer | January 21, 2019 In the 1960s, the Soviet Union built massive bunkers in Poland. These bunkers didn’t appear on maps, and were carefully concealed to be invisible to spies from the air.

But now, these long-abandoned buildings are revealing some of the secrets of Russian military strategy during the Cold War.

Soviet documents from that time period described the sites as communications centers, though the buildings vanished from official records soon after they were built. Indeed, at the time, the Soviet Union denied having nuclear weapons cached anywhere in Poland.

But researchers are finally taking up the investigation of these secret sites, and uncovered the bunkers’ primary purpose: storehouses for nuclear weapons. [In Photos: Soviets Hid Nuclear Bunkers in Poland’s Forests]

Archaeologist Grzegorz Kiarszys, an adjunct professor at the Institute of History and International Relations in Poland, has conducted the first in-depth exploration of three of these nuclear warhead storage facilities. By delving into archives of declassified satellite images and analyzing building scans, Kiarszys is piecing together the role that these secret sites played on the global chessboard, at a time when the threat of nuclear war between the world’s biggest superpowers was all too real.

His findings were published online today (Jan. 21) in First View, a preview of the journal Antiquity‘s February 2019 issue.

Tactical storage

For the study, Kiarszys looked at three abandoned top-secret facilities that stored nuclear weapons and housed military personnel:…….. https://www.livescience.com/64553-soviet-nuclear-bunkers-poland.html

January 22, 2019 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | EUROPE, weapons and war