Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/081092/08109930.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 3KB | 71 lines

                                                                                COVER STORY, Page 39

THE DOOMSDAY BLUEPRINTS

Moscow's Secret Plans


By James Carney/Moscow


    Unlike in the U.S., preparations for nuclear conflict during
the cold war remain tightly held secrets in Russia, a
reflection of the military's continued suspicion of the West.
But some information can be pieced together. According to
several sources, including former KGB officers, the Kremlin and
other key buildings in Moscow are still linked by underground
rail tunnels to an area about six miles outside the city center
called Ramenki, site of a vast subterranean bunker designed for
the country's leaders and their families. Responsibility for
protection of top Kremlin officials rested with the KGB's Ninth
Directorate, which delegated tasks to the Defense Ministry. A
KGB officer who claimed to have taken part in constructing the
Ramenki bunker described it to a Soviet newspaper last year as
an underground city about 500 acres in size, built at several
levels ranging in depth from 230 ft. to 395 ft. He said the
bunker was begun in the second half of the 1960s and completed
by the mid-'70s, could shelter as many as 120,000 people, and
included food supplies that could last up to 30 years. Quarters
for top leaders were comfortably appointed, and movie theaters
were built for entertainment. Some 30 miles outside Moscow in
Sofrino, an underground broadcast-communications installation
built during Nikita Khrushchev's tenure is now outdated and
inoperative, according to Igor Malashenko, deputy director of
state television and radio. "Because we don't need it anymore,
it's been slowly stripped of spare parts," he says. A similar
fate befell many of the tens of thousands of civilian bomb
shelters built as part of the massive Soviet civil defense
program. At a shelter 40 ft. below the main building of Moscow
State University, water has flooded some of the rooms, and
thieves have stripped the three-tiered bunks of more than half
the wooden plank beds, leaving only useless steel frames.

    Long before the demise of the Soviet Union, Russians
learned to dismiss as absurd the civil defense training courses
imposed on them at school and work. They refer to the courses
as grob, taken from the first two letters of the words for civil
defense -- grazhdanskaya oborona. Translation of grob: coffin.
The cynicism was justified. In 1988 an accidental air-raid alert
in the industrial city of Perm sent hundreds of thousands of
people scrambling for safety. As a test of civil defense, the
accident proved a disaster. Perm residents found many shelters
locked, flooded or infested with mosquitoes.

    How much did Moscow know about U.S. plans to survive a
nuclear attack? A former KGB official says spies watched for
signs that the U.S. was preparing a nuclear attack by monitoring
late-night activity at the Pentagon and keeping track of troop
movements. The KGB and GRU, the Soviet military intelligence
agency, also used agents to try to discover the location of the
bunkers set aside for U.S. leaders. "We did find out some of the
operation code names and hiding places," claims the official.
Sometimes the U.S.'s own planning methods tipped off the
Soviets. Says the official: "The rehearsals for responding to
Russian nuclear attacks helped us a great deal."