Port 78 Klaipeda, Lithuania

by Ed · June 1, 2022

Labas!

We awoke to the rumble of engines as we slow and turn to our docking berth on May 24th, 2022. The sun was shining, but it still wasn’t even 6:00 AM, so I laid back down for another hour.

Today, I have a tour on my own to see a “Soviet Nuclear Weapon Site”. Hmmm, we’re in Lithuania. Oh, yeah, that was part of the USSR. Joy is on her own, and plans to walk around town and do some shopping.

A local band was waiting for us on the dock! The music was folksy and fun! I hope they were warm enough – it was a chilly morning!

The bus waits at the end of the dock next to this statue – a young person holds what appears to be a hat with a ribbon, while the dog keeps an eye on me.

On the way out of town I spot this fun ship display in a park!

We don’t have far to go before the bus pulls off the highway and rattles down a gravel road toward a wall of trees. We stop and get out before we get to the trees. This birdhouse pole stands before us. There are seventeen different houses, designed for fifteen different birds, a bat, and a dormouse! Nearby is also a beehive with the honeycomb visible through a screen. These still don’t make sense even when we realize this is a national park. We keep walking…

…and through the trees we come upon this beautiful lake – Plateliai Lake! This is the remnant of an immense glacier that carved the valley, then retreated and melted to fill the lake. We are seeing this for a purpose. It is about 2 km away from the Soviet Nuclear Weapon Site we are about to visit.

Ten minutes later we are at the site. We approach the main building, walking on concrete roads similar to the Marston Mat steel plating used for rapid military development of roads and runways. It was a little awkward walking with the holes in the concrete.

Multiple tiers of protection were emplyed around the site. What we see today is an example only – the real fences were spread across 48 meters from the first to the last. I’ll show you a sign explaning this in a moment.

We are now officially in the Cold War Museum – at a Soviet Nuclear Weapon Site! This is Plokstine Missile Base.

We begin a long slow walk to the end of this road.

As I mentioned a moment ago, here is the sign explaining how the security perimeter originally looked. This included barbed wire, security trip wires, and high-voltage fencing.

We approach the “business end” of the weapons site. This is a Soviet SS-4 “Sandal” in-ground missile site. It has four missile silos.

Each silo has a protective cover to protect the missile from an initial strike. The cover slides back, we are told, by pulling on ropes. I could find no evidence of any ropes or pulleys. Nor could I find any other device that explains the opening mechanism.

We are told the silos were dug out by hand. A team of Estonian workmen were brought in to do the work. Estonians were selected because the locals could not understand their language, and this helped maintained the scecrecy of the project.

A hole would be dug down five meters, then a concrete sleeve dropped down. Then the silo would be dug another five meters, and the two sleeves allowed to drop. Then another sleeve would be dropped on top. This was repeated until the silo was 25 meters deep.

There are four silos, and in between them is the buried control center for the crew.

We meet our local tour guide, Lilia.

Then we head in! This dire warning is very scary! It says “Wipe Your Feet!” Seriously! That’s what it means!

We go through one, two, three, four, five secure hatch doors!

The first display room is a timeline of the Cold War.

This is the most curious display in the room. This is the uniform of a US Air Force missile launch officer! One of the other passengers almost went crazy about this. “I know what that badge is!” he kept saying. Lilia didn’t have an answer – she only started three weeks ago and we are her first tour group. The patches at the bottom tell me there must have been a post-Cold War event, and this was exchanged, probably for a similar Soviet shirt.

Here is a model of a silo. When the silos were dug a trench was also dug to the Plateliai Lake we saw eariler. The intent was to use lake water to fill the bottom of the missile tube during a launch to suppress the noise and prevent damage to the silo. This allowed the silo to be reused.

Here is a 1/10th scall model of the SS-4 missile that occupied the silos.

This is what is looks like from the side. The SS-4 was a medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM). It carried a single 1-Megaton nuclear warhead.

Communications teams were on duty 24 hours a day, and wore the hooded headsets so they would never be away from their comms. They even had 15-meter cords on the headsets to allow them to go the bathroom without taking the headset off. Anyone who missed receiving and acknowledging a message, real or test, whould be executed. Pretty good motivation to keep the headset on, eh?

Electronics for monitoring and controlling the rocket systems once occupied this room. Now only the face panels are here.

This was an odd site – a rubberized gas mask was laying on a rail in front of the panels. You can see two of these in the photo above. It wouldn’t have been needed here, but this rocket system did use storable liquid propellants – kerosene for the fuel, and a mix of nitic acid and nitrogen tetroflouride for the oxidizer. The HNO3/N2O4 mix would require full protective equipment.

Lilia told us a story about scavengers breaking in to the site before it was declared an historical site. A group of four people came in and cut up as much metal as they could find to haul out through the air vents. They found the HNO3/N2O4 tank, and even though it was drained it was never cleaned. The scavengers cut up the tank and hauled it out, but within four years all of them died from cancer from eposure to the oxidizer residue.

Next door in the generator room the scavengers also tried to cut up the motor. But the metal was too thick and heavy and they gave up.

The procedures for transferring propellants is still on the wall.

This is one of the hallways from the control station to a silo. We get to take a walk!

From the hallway this is the normal crew access into the silo. This is a narrow slot that requires a hands and knees approach. The grid flips down to provide steps to get to the hole.

For ease of access by museum visitors a hole was cut into the silo and stairs were added.

We are under the domed cover I showed you earlier. There is a very narrow walkway around the perimeter. We can’t pass each other, so we agree to walk in a clockwise direction. There are two “catwalks” that simply allow us to lean out over the silo to take photos.