‘Destroyer of worlds’ uncovered as their secrets
New discovery uncovers details of Soviet Union nuclear bunkers that contained warheads throughout Poland
Te following written content from James Rogers
Experts uncover new details of Soviet Union bunkers that once housed nuclear warheads across Poland and hope the findings will reveal new insights into the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union left a chilling legacy of the Cold War dotted across Poland – bunkers that once housed nuclear warheads hidden deep in the nation’s forests.
Experts are now uncovering new details of the once-secret sites. In the journal Antiquity, archaeologist Grzegorz Kiarszys argues that the crumbling former nuclear bases should be protected and studied because “they have the potential to increase our understanding of the general mechanisms related to such phenomena as conflict, totalitarianism and cultural identity.”
The article is titled “The destroyer of worlds hidden in the forest: Cold War nuclear warhead sites in Poland.”
RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS UNEARTH REMAINS OF SECRET NAZI ARCTIC BASE
The bunkers were built by the Poles during the 1960s in the belief that they were constructing communication barracks for Soviet troops. However, when the bases were handed over to the Soviet military in 1969 they disappeared from official records, according to Kiarszys.
“Soon after completion of the bases, some documents were destroyed, and maps and blueprints were sent back to Moscow,” he writes, in Antiquity. “There are no known plans of the facilities in the Polish archives, no information about their spatial organization, field defenses, landscape context or any potential modification.”
Even aerial photos taken by the Polish Cartographic Service from the end of the 1960s to the early 1990s were carefully censored, according to the archaeologist.
WORKERS UNCOVER FORGOTTEN WWII MILITARY AIR RAID SHELTER
Keen to unearth details about the sites, Kiarszys used laser-scanning data, historical maps, declassified satellite images and historical aerial photography to study three abandoned bunkers in western Poland. Archaeology, he says, can serve as a sort of detective to reveal new details about the Cold War.
Two of the three former nuclear storage sites featured in the study are badly damaged – Kiarszys notes that almost all of the buildings at Brzeźnica Kolonia and Templewo were demolished in the mid-1990s. Even the concrete road surfaces have been removed although the ‘Monolit’ bunkers that once housed the nuclear warheads remain. Read more from Fox
Follow similar interesting non political news stories from News Without Politics
