Like most people, I am very much a child of my time. At the end of the eighties, when the communist governments were overthrown by a peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe and the Berlin Wall came down, I was around ten years old. Much too young to properly understand what was going on, but old enough to realize this was big. The glorious feeling of those times, when the world seemed to finally come together as one after decades of hostilities between east and west, left deeper an impression on me than any other event I could think of. You can therefore imagine my feelings, when I visited one of the most impressive remains of the cold war era for the first time: the gigantic radar array DUGA. A 150x800m, 13.000 ton steel behemoth built for the sole purpose of detecting possible attacks from the west, particularly the United States. With a range of 15.000km, it would have given the Soviets about 25 minutes to react, had it ever detected an actual missile attack on the USSR. The thought of how afraid of each other those in charge at the time must have been, to deem such a gargantuan construction effort necessary for the safety of their people, gives me the chills every time I get there....
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 20:37:36 +0000