Plokštinė missle base

I had read that there was an accessible ex-soviet underground missile silo located around 50km north east of Klapedia. It was going to be impossible to get there via public transport, so me and a few people I had met in Lithuania decided to hire a car for the day and drive out there.

The Plokštinė missile base is located near lake Plateliai, in the centre of a national park. It was built in 1962 and housed R-12U intermediate range ballistic missiles, tipped with 2 megaton thermonuclear warheads pointed deep into the heart of Europe.

The national park it was built in was quite beautiful. We had lunch by the lake. Birds were singing and flowers were blooming, and just a few hundred meters away was the base, hidden in a forest clearing.

The base was closed in 1978 as the Americans had learnt of the location of the base through satellite photography and the place was looted and vandalised by the local population. After the collapse of the USSR the base was turned over to the national park administration who have made it an 'Exposition of Militarism' and run guided tours on request. I tried to get into the site, however it was locked up tight. The blast doors are designed to handle 300PSI overpressure, so there was no way I could force my way in. We dropped by the national park office and picked up a nice ranger who gave us a tour for around $10 AUS.

It was amazing to be in a site that would have featured prominantly in the end of the world. Most of the equipment had been removed by looters, however our guide had talked to several ex-soviet generals and gave us a full run down of the day to day operation of the base. Reportedly there were only 2 times this base became fully active with warheads loaded and rockets fueled, during the Cuban missile crisis, and when Czechoslovakia tried to move away from the USSR's doctrinal line in communism.

There are four silos, each covered with a retractable blast door (as seen above). When the missiles were armed and the blast door withdrawn they could be fueled and launched in half an hour.

This tunnel goes to the fuel storage tanks. There were massive tanks of Kerosene and Nitric acid that would send the missiles to England, Germany, Turkey and the other NATO targets in Western Europe. OPACNO means 'DANGER' in Russian, it was sprayed onto the wall after a Lithuanian man crawled into a fuel tank to scrape the Aluminum from the tank and was overcome by the fumes and died.

The silos themselves were around 28 meters deep, and 6m across. The missile inside would have been much narrower, however there was room needed for technicians and fueling equipment. The rockets on launch would have become so hot that they had cut a tunnel from the lake to flood the silos as the launch occurred to cool them.

All in all a very cool urbex location. Oh, I am also now in Poland. Krakow is very nice. Anyway, Till next time.