Secret Mountain   

Just how do you keep a mountain secret? Let's take a look at a secret Russian military installation that makes Area 51 look like a friendly visitor centre...


Mount Yamantau

It reads like a Tom Clancy novel. The highest mountain in the southern Urals, Yamantau (or Yamantaw) is suspected to be Russia's Dead Man's Handle. If, in the unlikely event, the entire Soviet government is wiped out, then Yamantau will automatically erupt like a volcano, but instead of lava, the mountain will spew forth a sizeable arsenal of nuclear missiles. Just enough to destroy the planet a few thousand times over.

You don't want to under-cook the pig, after all.

This system is supposedly called "Dead Hand" and was revealed after Perestroika (Restructuring), a huge disruptive shift in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which has been blamed for the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent end of the Cold War. During Perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev was instrumental in pushing for Glasnost (Openness), a massive media relations programme where many Soviet secrets were uncloaked, such as the N1 Rocket project.

Yamantau has seen considerable excavation and building work in the past two decades. Supported by three nearby Closed Cities (locked-down places with entry/exit restrictions), Mezhgorye, Tirlyanskiy and Beloretsk (with a total population well in excess of 60,000), it is estimated that over $6 billion has been spent hollowing out the cave and building a nuclear-war-proof city inside it for Russian's political and military elite in case of World War Three. Or, as I said before, turning it into a giant retaliatory attack machine, should the elite be vapourised...

One shocking fact about the project is that the money to build the thing may be coming from the United States, whose government pushes hundreds of millions of dollars into Soviet pockets to help them dismantle their nuclear arsenal under START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). Meanwhile, Russia has claimed it is unable to pay $250 million owed to public sector workers in the country.

To put that into perspective, the annual expenditure on military intelligence in the country is over $30 billion.

So what do we know about Yamantaw? Well, the most compelling stories come from defectors. Colonel Stanislav Lunev, the highest ranking military official to defect said:

"[Yamatau] is a huge underground city, which could be used in time when many Russian cities are destroyed, but the military and political elite will survive and live until our planet will try to restore itself."

Ex-KGB operative, Colonel Oleg Gordievsky, upon his defection said:

"And what is interesting was that President Yeltsin and Russia's new democratic leaders are using those facilities, and the same service is still running the same facility, like it was 10, 15 years ago."

Back in 1997, Yamantau was discussed at length by Congress. They said:

• "[Yamantau Mountain] is designed to survive a nuclear war and appears to exceed reasonable defense requirements."


• "The Yamantau Mountain project does not appear to be consistent with the lowering of strategic threats, openness, and cooperation that is the basis of the post-Cold War strategic partnership between the United States and Russia."

And they demanded the Russians "provide to the United States a written explanation on the principal and secondary purposes of the Yamantau Mountain project, specifically identifying the intended end user and explaining the heavy investment in that project".

In other words, the Unites States are pretty scared by Yamantau. It wouldn't be the first time that Russia has hidden nukes, after the fall of the Soviet Union 73 SS-23 nuclear missiles (the equivalent of 365 Hiroshimas) were found in undergound bases in Eastern Europe. These missiles would have given Russia a significant advantage if war broke out because they could have been used to launch a surprise attack on Europe. This "prior" is ringing alarm bells.


UVB-76

While we're on the subject of secret Russian things, my current favourite (besides Yamantau) Moscovite mystery is the UVB-76 "buzzer" transmitter.

UVB-76 is rumoured to be part of the Dead Hand programme. It has been broadcasting a monotonous buzz since 1982. On only a handful of occasions, the buzzing has stopped briefly for a voice to read out a series of Russian names and numbers, before continuing the incessant buzzing again. Two examples:

9pm (GMT+0000), Dec 24th 1997: "Ya UVB-76, Ya UVB-76. 180 08 BROMAL 74 27 99 14. Boris, Roman, Olga, Mikhail, Anna, Larisa. 7 4 2 7 9 9 1 4."

1:35pm (GMT+0000), Aug 23rd, 2010: "UVB-76, UVB-76. 93 882 NAIMINA 74 14 35 74" (recording)

That second voice broadcast, if converted into longitude and latitude, points to the Barents Sea. During that week, the Russian Navy was trialling a new missile in the Barents. Although some suggest that was too obvious, and this was actually a disinformation broadcast intended to misdirect listeners from the actual function of UVB-76.

Also of interest is the "Russian Woodpecker", a huge transmitter/receiver pair separated by 60km which was alleged to be an "over-the-horizon" radar system, or a Soviet mind-control device, or an attempt to control the weather. The most spooky thing about it is that its transmitter was (and still is) located just next to Chernobyl, but continued to broadcast for 3 years after the radioactive incident before falling quiet in 1989.

Finally, if you've ever played Call of Duty: Black Ops, you've likely already seen the Russian Woodpecker "Duga-3" transmitter, because it is in the background in the map called "Grid":





Oh, and STOP THE PRESS! Mount Yamantau will be a map in the successor to Black Ops, Modern Warfare 3!