A scenic national park is the unlikely setting for a former Soviet-era nuclear missile base

In Soviet times only locals suspected that there was a military base in the beautiful countryside of western Lithuania. Nowadays, this former strategic Cold War site has become a tourist attraction.


Arms race

In the 1950s, the achievements of the USSR in creating spacecraft and rocket carriers, as well as the first satellite to be launched into orbit around the Earth, provoked the nuclear arms race. The USA acknowledged that the Russians had overtaken them. (True, later, with the help of Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who passed secrets to the Americans and the British, it transpired that Khrushchev was just fooling the world.)

At the end of the 1950s, this was convenient for the Americans. The US government received approval to allocate significant funds to create missile systems. While the Americans, encouraged by cries of “the Russians are coming”, were digging nuclear shelters in their backyards, the military were also digging into taxpayers’ dollars and roubles stolen from their own citizens, on both sides of the Atlantic. Underground ballistic missile systems were very well protected, both from the enemy’s spies, and from direct nuclear attack.

Almost at the same time, at the beginning of the 1960s, similar ballistic missile installations began to function in Plattsburgh, a town near Lake Champlain, in New York State in the USA, and in the village of Plokščiai, on Lake Plateliai in Lithuania, which was then part of the USSR.
Gerald Fitzpatrick, who bought the Plattsburgh missile base last year, is planning to renovate it and open it to visitors.

The rocket base in Plokščiai has been receiving hordes of tourists from all over the world for several years now.
It is unlikely that the visitors go down the tunnels to admire the engineering. Similar, or more impressive installations, can be found in any part of the world, and maybe even around the corner. Nevertheless, many tourists from abroad want to go to the Žemaitija National Park in western Lithuania, to see the former missile base there, and to stand on the lid of at least one of the four missile shafts. A tourist from Germany said it felt as if he was standing on the tip of a death-bearing rocket.


On stand-by

This is close to the truth, because if we believe the former chief engineer at this base, Major Svilokuzov, two of the four missiles were on stand-by, ready to carry nuclear warheads to cities in West Germany, and another two to Britain and Norway.

He has also said that the SS-4 missiles that stood motionless in their start positions were very reliable. That is to say, with no complicated electronics that can break down during the flight, and flying only at the target which was programmed before the start.

The SS-4-type intermediate-range missile, with an atomic warhead of one to 1.3 megatons, could fly about 2,000 kilometres. Atlas F from Plattsburgh could fly just over 10,000.

The depth of the SS-4 shaft was around 30 metres. The American missile required a pit double that depth.
Therefore, nearly the only similarity shared by the missiles deployed at both sites was that they were hidden underground, and that launch squads kept watch 24 hours a day.


Missile crisis

The biggest challenge that fell to these squads was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Then the world stood on the threshold of a third world war. Common sense, however, prevailed. The USSR agreed to remove the missiles, and the United States promised not to attack Cuba.

The crisis alerted not only the two squads, of the Soviet and the US armed forces, but also the American allies in Europe. A few years ago, at the SS-4 shafts in Plokščiai, David Holiday, the first British defence attaché in Lithuania after the country regained independence, and now a retired Royal Air Force officer living in Lithuania, met the retired Colonel Aleksandras Žarys of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces.

They recalled how they were both on tenterhooks for several days and nights, and were about to attack each other. They made guesses as to which of the four missiles from Lake Plateliai would fly towards Holiday’s bomber squadron.
Plattsburgh, the 15-million-dollar missile platform, served a mere three years. The Soviets too had to respond in kind. Nevertheless, we will never find out how much it cost the Soviet Union to build the first underground nuclear missile launch pad in Lithuania, a complex consisting of four shafts and a command post. Plus the barracks in the middle of the forest, and a block of houses for officers in the town of Plungė.


Legacy

The soldiers and officers moved out only 17 years later, leaving the welded doors of the command post and the barracks to their fate, and the Soviet-style order, that is, “you can take all that is unattended.”

Immediately, the facilities attracted the locals, to whom the welded door proved to be no obstacle. They were drawn by the military equipment, copper, electric and telephone cables, things that could be traded or used at home.
One of them used to go to the shafts on his way to work. He was a jack-of-all-trades, a plumber, a blacksmith and a mechanic, and he took home everything he could. His trophies were pipes, taps, electric motors, copper rods, cables and sheets of metal.

After slipping in and out of the deserted shafts several times, he suddenly fell ill. The doctors were unable to diagnose his problem, and were helpless to do anything. The patient passed away after a few months.

Word spread of a deadly danger lurking in the shafts. Svilokuzov said he knew only of samin, a highly toxic missile fuel component. According to him, three or four inhalations of its fumes cause a deadly disease, which civilian doctors might not recognise.

However, the former chief engineer was sure that the samin had been carefully collected and taken away, and that there could not be any left in the system of pipes. Now there is no trace of the pipelines themselves, as everything has been taken away. Instead, in 1996 the national park set up an exhibition in a shaft and the command post, which attracts crowds of tourists.


Twelve months to dig

During a tour of the underground tunnels, visitors see not only the legacy of the Soviet forces, but can also hear stories of how the base was built.

The guides are particularly fond of the story about the efforts to keep the facility secret.

According to Kajetonas Meškauskas, who served as a military doctor in the construction unit, as soon as soldiers began to dig, the Voice of America radio station reported what was going on here, what missiles would be deployed, and their technical characteristics. Soviet military counterintelligence first interrogated the local priest, but he swore he did not know anything.

Later it turned out that, in a shop, the wife of the unit commander had brazenly, in a way typical of Russians, told other women what her husband was doing there, and how the glorious Soviet army would fire from the forests and crush the ‘damn imperialists’.

After that incident, the unit commander and his wife disappeared, but the construction work continued. In nearby Šateikiai, surface launch pads were built without any difficulty.

Meanwhile, in Plokščiai, soldiers came across an obstacle, water. It began to seep into the pit as soon as the bottom reached the level of the lake.

First the army did something appalling. In the southern part of the lake, they enlarged a bay and made a broad channel for water to flow out into the River Babrungas. The water level of Lake Plateliai, the largest and most beautiful lake in Žemaitija, sank, and the shores became so bare that you could drive the 30 kilometres around it.
The experiment yielded one positive result: on the bottom of the now shallower lake, locals saw piles of stones and believed that they saw inscriptions on them. In 2004, underwater archaeologists from Klaipėda University examined them.

But the army did not achieve the expected result. Water continued to seep into the pits of the launch shafts.

Engineers finished the work by using an unusual method. They covered the cavity that was being dug with a hermetic seal, made a hole in it, mounted a sluice to lift the soil out, and inside the pit they installed a caisson capsule.
When the pressure was increased by up to two atmospheres in the pit, the water stopped flowing and the soldiers deepened the pit with spades as if they were working underground 20 metres deep. Before they started the work under pressure, they would acclimatise their bodies in the caisson capsule for two hours, and again after the work they would wait for two hours until their bodies had readjusted to normal pressure.

Only five soldiers at a time could dig, so it is no wonder that it took nearly 12 months to dig a cavity in the ground 30 metres deep and 12 metres wide. The other three shafts were dug much faster, because they did not have to wrestle with the problem of how to dig, or how to cover the walls with concrete. According to Meškauskas, there were four building battalions, each comprising four companies of 125 men.


Shrouded in secrecy

Although more than 40 years have passed since the end of the construction work, locals still remember how trucks carried missile fuel and equipment for the launch systems from the railway station during the night.

A convoy would appear when it was already dark. A car preceded the convoy, and a soldier would jump out of it, and, walking along the village streets, would order lights to be switched off and the windows shut.

People said then that it was so that the Americans could not see what was going on on the ground from their planes; but why close your windows on a sultry summer night? It emerged that the noxious missile fuel was evaporating, so it was transported when there were fewer people on the roadside, and windows had to be shut to prevent the vapour from getting into homes. Locals knew when the construction work was finished. The railway station, which had been receiving only military freight trains, reopened to passengers; and in the woods mushroom and berry gatherers and foresters came across several rows of barbed-wire fences.

The completed facility was like an unavoidable, but unknown and unreachable, addition to their daily lives. When the army left in 1979, people lost interest in the base. It was when the Žemaitija National Park decided to set up an exhibition that interest revived.

Today, the former barracks house an ecological education centre, and every day several groups of visitors descend below ground without fear.

A part of the story told by the guides is how the SS-4 missiles were deployed in Cuba in 1962. They were carried from Šateikiai to Sevastopol. There they were loaded on to merchant ships and taken to Cuba.

Penkovsky, who was called the spy who saved the world, told the Americans about the missiles deployed right under their noses. His information was confirmed by data gleaned by air reconnaissance; and then the great crisis began, to which the tunnels in the beautiful Plokščiai forest in Lithuania are a witness.

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