Nukes n' shit

Several years ago, we had the opportunity to visit Lithuania's top-secret military communications headquarters, also known as Military Base 15312. 

Personally, it was the largest underground structure I had ever been in, with an estimated total area of around 5,000 m². It was also the first two-floor bunker I had visited, which made it an unforgettable experience. The sheer scale of such a military installation was truly impressive. 

The entire military base is heavily guarded by motion sensors, cameras, armed personnel, and guard dogs. It occupies an area of about 100,000 m², which is not as massive as some nuclear missile bases, but still impressive considering its sole purpose was to be the connecting point of telephone lines.

To give some context about the importance of the base at the time here's a CIA report from 1967 about the communications site:

Areal photograph taken by a surveillance plane which took part in the KEYHOLE mission, which's objective was to identify significant military objects in the USSR:

Description of the base:

To start off the tour, our team enters the bunker trough massive curved hermetic doors, it took us quite a bit of effort to open them.

To our surprise, we encounter 2 more doors! Those were a little easier to open.

On the left there's an absolutely massive transformer, unlike most equipment here, it is new, as the military base was transferred to the ministry of defense in 1992 and operated for a few years until it was decommissioned.

The sign "High voltage, dangerous for life!" did not scare us away, so we dug a little deeper.

The room behind the door, it has the bunker's main power switches mounted.

I tried turning them on, but to no avail... It seems like there's no electricity.

As we delve deeper into the structure we find the main control room.

A single generator was capable of producing up to 250 kW of power!

A look at another angle with a colleague in the background.

Let's take a peek behind the installations.

We continue the tour to the generator room, again, we'll have to open some heavy doors to do that.

The generator room:

From the back:

The engine's cooling systems

A huge 1000L diesel tank, there's one for each generator.

One last look at the control systems.

Trough the corridors...

And into the ventilation systems...

There are even air recuperation systems - in the winter the air is heated and in the summer cooled.

from another angle...

Entry to the air filtering systems.

Close up.

Here we captured the beauty of hermetic doors.

And out we go to discover the secrets this place hides...

More corridors...

Some kind of air mixing chamber...

Then we reach one of the administrative complexes, and of course, they're insulated from the technical section by even more hermetic doors.

And we're finally there.

One more corridor...

Radio communications systems.

In we go

Some kind of telephone commutator

More commutators...

Remains of radio systems.

Nothing interesting on the first floor, so let's go up

Looks like someone had fun making these :D 

Second intelligence squad.

More rooms...

Even more corridors, you get the idea, this maze is endless. And that's just the first half of the administrative part...

Plan of the technical section's first floor:

Restrooms.

Someone had the brilliant idea to make a smell absorption system - that's the most overkill restroom I've ever seen :D 

TO EMERGENCY EXIT

And out we go

I'll end the blog with that. The bunker was truly massive, I've covered less than a quarter of it and a full blog about the whole base could probably make for a dozen posts. In total the bunker took us about 4 hours to explore, there's hope we'll visit more objects like this in the future.