The approximately 7.5 km long access road, made of concrete slabs, runs long, almost in a straight line between the trees, until it takes a long curved right turn for the last 1.5 km stretch. From here, you can already see the final destination in the distance, as it rises surreally above the crowns of the trees.

A wall in the middle of the forest
From a distance, Duga looks like a fence in the middle of the forest that starts in the middle of nowhere and quickly ends in nowhere. If you take a closer look, however, you can already see that the radar screens are made up of hundreds of antennas and turbines.

Of course, no one could take a closer look at it for a long time, but in 2013 it became accessible to visitors together with Chernobyl (and Pripyat) within an organized framework. Anyone who gets here will find traces of the evacuation carried out hastily after the disaster, just like in Pripyat. Everywhere there are forgotten vehicles, steel barrels, broken electronics, and scrap metal next to the radar rusting in great solitude. And there is a lot of all of this because a small town was built to operate the radar so that there would be a place (secretly) for the approximately one thousand workers to live.

Detecting, tracking, and, if appropriate, destroying the launch of American intercontinental ballistic missiles as soon as possible was considered a particularly important task, which determined the development and installation of high-performance radars. In the Soviet Union, after the tests with the R-1 and R-2 missiles, already at the end of the 1940s – although at that time only on a theoretical level – they worked on the creation of a possible missile defense system. However, the design bureaus only switched to a higher gear at the very end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s, and in the following years, they developed several radars capable of detecting incoming missile warheads from 5-6,000 km away.

The basic task of the experimental Duga-1, and then Duga-2, which was put into service in the Chernobyl and Homjel area in 1976, was the detection of missile launches on the territory of the United States. He performed this task in the upper atmosphere, observing waves reflected from the ionosphere. Thanks to the radio signals bouncing off the ionosphere, taking advantage of the Earth’s curvature, they were able to easily observe nuclear-charged missiles launched from the northern part of the United States, near Canada, from the territory of today’s Ukraine. Or they could have known, but fortunately, the Cold War never escalated to such a missile launch.

In the event of such an attack, they would have been able to detect the attack two to three minutes after the launch of the missile in order to launch an appropriate response. The American missiles used at the time would have reached the Soviet Union in roughly 30 minutes. The former commander of the radar system, Vladimir Muszijec, spoke the most about this, for example in the 2015 documentary The Russian Woodpecker, made about the Russian woodpecker. In the film, they deal quite a bit with the rather wild conspiracy theory that the entire Chernobyl disaster was staged to cover up the design flaws of the super-secret military radar system, and that it should be taken out of service not because of this, but because of the nuclear disaster. Of course, none of this is true.

The integrated early warning system according to the Kremlin’s ideas took shape in the early 1970s, which, in addition to the aforementioned radars, also included military reconnaissance satellites and “over-the-horizon” locators. The Duga-3 type near Chernobyl already belonged to the latter, and its name came from this characteristic: duga = arch, arch, thus referring to the curvature of the Earth, beyond which it was capable of the planned task. Its construction began in 1972, then it became operational in the summer of 1976, receiving the electromagnetic waves reflected from thousands of kilometers from the transmitter installed about 60 km NE of it, near Ljubecs.

Entering the technical area and coming close to the antennas, it was only really apparent what a huge structure it was. The larger “sign” is 146 m high and 530 m long, but even though its smaller brother standing next to it is 90 m long, the two antenna fields together extend for about 820 m. The huge dimensions were justified by the reception of radio signals reflected from very far away, significantly scattered, and very weakened. Walking between the support columns and looking up at the bars, the almost out-of-this-world structure is astonishing. The cylindrical receiving antennas are located on 20 levels, the panorama is impressive even from a height of 34-40 m.

In the West, quite different, but no less wild, theories were born. Since they could only detect the radio signal coming from the radar, reminiscent of a wooden clapper – but it could be caught even in the Pacific Ocean – people in America speculated what the purpose of the mysterious signal could be. They came to the conclusion that perhaps they were dealing with some secret Soviet mind-control experiment, which was, of course, the product of Cold War paranoia.
The location and function of Duga-2 were really a secret for a long time, even if the knocking radio signal received worldwide revealed its existence. And this radio signal was not only audible but also caused serious interference both in the Soviet Union and outside of it. In the aforementioned documentary, the deputy commander of the Duga talks about how the system even interfered with the SOS signals during the first settings, so they changed the frequency. At that time, however, the aurora borealis was a problem – the radio signals could not penetrate it, meaning that the Duga could not fulfill its task of monitoring America. According to other former Soviet officers who also worked on the project, however, the system was not clearly doomed, as it was planned to be ready for combat in September 1986, but the nuclear disaster intervened.

The object named Chernobyl-2 (the regiment serving here belonged organizationally to the weapons of the National Air Defense Missile and Space Forces), like many other military bases, consisted of two main parts: the service barracks and the closed technical area separated from it by a fence. In the former, there are 4-5 story residential and office buildings, a school, kindergarten, boiler house, warehouses, officers’ club, canteen, etc., i.e. almost everything that is essential for the life of such a community. For example, the surprisingly detailed model of the barracks in one of the training rooms of the fire department building is attractive, and despite its slightly worn condition, it still looks good.

• telex.hu/csernobil-duga-radar-osszeeskuves-elmelet HUN
• haborumuveszete.hu/latogatas-a-csernobil-melletti-duga-radarnal
• travelblogeurope.com/the-giant-abandoned-computer-center-at-chernobyl-2/
• chernobyllab.com/tour/cold-war-duga-chernobyl-2
• chernobylstory.com/command-center-of-duga-1