SIGHTINGS



US Increasingly Suspicious
Of Massive Russian
Underground Complex
http://www.usdefense.com/june2000/B/7/story2.htm
6-7-00
 
RUSSIA - U.S. intelligence personnel and some lawmakers are growing increasingly concerned over a massive underground complex some suspect is either a nuclear research facility or a nuclear survival complex for Russian military and government officials.
 
According to a report on Tuesday in link , the huge underground facility is located underneath Yamantau Mountain in the Urals. U.S. intelligence officials estimate that it is at least the size of Washington, DC (inside the Beltway; or about 400 square miles) and able to house about 60,000 people.
 
"U.S. intelligence sources [say] that the Yamantau complex is but one of some 200 secret deep underground nuclear war-fighting sites in Russia, many of which have been significantly upgraded over the past six years at a cost of billions of dollars," said the online newspaper's report.
 
Since 1990, the symbolic end of the Cold War, military and CIA intelligence officials believe Moscow has spent some $6 billion on the construction of the Yamantau Mountain bunker.
 
Worse, American officials say they have no idea what is actually going on within the confines of the massive bunker. Russian officials have kept very tight-lipped about the project, and WorldNetDaily.com said that it is directly controlled Russian President Vladimir Putin -- who inherited the project from former President Boris Yeltsin.
 
Some see it as a doomsday survival bunker. "The only potential use for this site is post-nuclear war," said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Maryland Republican, and widely viewed as at least a limited expert on the Yamantau Mountain project.
 
The complex "is located close to one of Russia's remaining nuclear weapons labs, Chelyabinsk-70, giving rise to speculation it could house either a nuclear warhead storage site, a missile base, a secret nuclear weapons production center, a directed energy laboratory or a buried command post. Whatever it is, Yamantau was designed to survive a nuclear war," said the newspaper on Tuesday.
 
U.S. officials have tried in vain for years to get Russian officials to talk about it, but have only received conflicting and incomplete information -- if not outright denials over what is suspected of taking place there, officials told the newspaper.
 
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