Russia scrambles to build 5000 new bomb shelters by 2012 for strategic nuclear strike
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Communist Bloc Military Updates: Kremlin to build 5,000 new bomb shelters by 2012
Tu-95s test-fire cruise missiles, Duma awards FSB with KGB powers
Pictured above: The new and improved KGB: A Russian Federal Security Service officer.
The Kremlin-run media reports that Moscow regional authorities have given the green light to architects to design and build 5,000 bomb shelters for the express purpose of protecting Muscovites from strategic nuclear attack. Moscow’s outdated shelters were built during the Soviet era and can house no more than one half of the city’s current population.
More emergency shelters are needed in Moscow’s suburbs, reports Russia Today. According to the requirements of civil defence authorities, the new shelters must be easy to build and will be situated 10 to 15 meters under apartment blocks, shopping centers, sport complexes, and parks.
Beginning in the 1930s, Soviet authorities built 7,000 bomb shelters throughout Moscow. Some subway stations were purposely built deep under the city to double as air raid shelters. In the early 1990s many shelters were privatized by entrepreneurs who transformed them into warehouses, parking lots, and restaurants.
The modernization of Moscow’s air raid shelter network is to be completed by 2012, which suggests that Missile Day will probably not take place before that date.
The US government has implemented no comparable program since the supposed end of the Cold War in 1991.
Question for dot.gov: If the Cold War is over, then why are Russian authorities building new bomb shelters?
Fact: There are only two countries that are capable of lobbing nuclear warhead-tipped ballistic missiles at Russia. One is Red China, with which Russia buried the hatchet in an open alliance formed in 2001. The other, of course, is the USA. So, ahem, got CD?
Incidentally, Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s civil defence czar, is an “ex”-CPSU cadre and related by marriage to Oleg Shenin, mastermind of the phoney anti-Gorbachevist coup of August 1991. Shenin died in 2009.
Last year, Shoigu visited Serbia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to help the red regimes there to set up “emergency situations” centers.
The “ex”-communist Socialist Party of Serbia holds several important government portfolios in Belgrade, including the interior ministry.
Another newsworthy development shows that Russia continues to prepare for war against its old adversary, the USA. Last Friday, two Tu-95 strategic bombers test-fired cruise missiles at targets in the Pemboi testing site during a 12-hour flight.
Pemboi is located in the internal republic of Komi.
The Bear bombers returned to the Ukrainka air base in Far East Russia. A MiG-31 interceptor jet and a Beriev A-50 Shmel airborne early warning aircraft also participated in the exercise.
Communist Bloc Power Plays in Eurasia and Latin America
Several weeks ago, the Russian Far East was the location of a multi-branch military exercise called Vostok 2010, personally observed by President Dmitry Medvedev aboard the nuclear-powered missile cruiser Peter the Great. In attendance were military delegations from Ukraine, which since February has boasted a pro-Moscow government, and the People’s Republic of China.
General Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian General Staff, dispelled any notion that Vostok 2010 was intended to be an unfriendly signal toward Red China. “The exercises took place on a vast territory near China, our ally,” he explained, adding: “So, it was quite logical to invite their representatives and thus avoid possible questions who the exercises were targeted against, and why. I think we scattered any possible doubts.”
With respect to the Ukrainian presence at Vostok 2010, Makarov commented: “This was a considerable improvement of bilateral relations and the Ukrainian desire to develop the[ir] armed forces proceeding from our experience. They wanted to see the effect of the [Russian] armed forces’ reform on the operation of servicemen. We met their desire, and the defence minister [Anatoly Serdyukov] invited a Ukrainian delegation to the exercises.” The Russian and Ukrainian air forces are slated to hold a joint exercise this fall.
The Moscow-Beijing Axis, which was predicted by KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn in his 1984 book New Lies for Old, will hold another multilateral military drill in Kazakhstan later this year. “Peace Mission 2010” will take place under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and represents the fifth significant Sino-Russian war game since 2005. According to Golitsyn, the Soviet and Chinese communists intend to form “one clenched fist” to smash the “bourgeois” nations.
The Soviet strategists are also moving cautiously back into Latin America. In February we reported that Russia intends to carry out for the first time ever a combined exercise with Nicaragua. However, no date for this event was offered by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was then visiting Managua. This would not be the first time Russia has held combined exercises with a Latin American country. In September 2008 the Russian Air Force deployed two Tu-160 strategic bombers to Venezuela for a week-long exercise over the southern Caribbean Sea. Two months later the Russian Navy arrived in South America to hold a joint drill with its Venezuelan counterpart. At the time further Russian-Venezuelan naval and air force exercises were promised, but have yet to materialize.
For their part, the communist regimes in Caracas and Managua were slated to hold a joint exercise in Central America in May and June of this year, but this also has yet to occur. According to articles published in the Latin American media in September and December 2009, a small contingent of Venezuelan troops was to oversee the deployment of combat aircraft and warships in Nicaragua. Since Hugo Chavez has over the last 10 years accumulated considerable firepower from Russia, including fighter jets, tactical missiles, and tanks, we have considered the possibility that the Soviet strategists may position their military assets in Nicaragua under the guise of Nicaraguan-Venezuelan exercises.
In a not unrelated development, the Nicaraguan military has modernized and reactivated the air base at Punta Huete, built with Soviet help in the 1980s but never utilized. The Panchito Aerodrome, which caused some consternation for the Reagan Administration, can accommodate Russia’s Tu-160 and Tu-95 nuclear bombers.
In Russia’s “Backyard”: FM Lavrov Attends International Conference in Kabul, Pledges Arms and Training for Afghan Military and Police
Latin America is sometimes referred to as the USA’s “backyard.” If Russia has a backyard, then Afghanistan certainly falls within this domain. In another story that exposes Moscow’s continued meddling in Afghanistan and, thus, the deceptive nature of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, state-run Novosti reports that Russia will arm the Afghan military and police forces, as well as train Afghan police in Russia. At an international conference on restoring peace to Afghanistan, held in Kabul, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared:
We are working with our partners on additional measures for supplying the Afghan army and police and expanding cooperation in training personnel for the Afghan armed forces. We will henceforth assist in forming the Afghan armed forces, including by increasing the number of Afghan police officers, trained in Russia, who contribute to the restoration of the country’s economy.
Lavrov joined other conference participants in discussing the timeframe for troop withdrawal by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force. Earlier this year Moscow cancelled a US$891 million debt owed to Russia by the US-backed Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai. As a sidenote, the Left.ru website alleges that Russian military intelligence (GRU) is arming the Taliban via Russian and Chechen criminal syndicates that operate across the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border.
Back in the USSR: FSB Receives KGB-Style Powers to Crush Anti-Kremlin Dissent
Even though the Communist Party of the Soviet Union abandoned its public monopoly of power in 1991, the Soviet strategists continue to rely on a passive population that obediently votes for potemkin parties like United Russia. Last Friday, the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, approved a bill that will permit the Federal Security Service (FSB), which was hived off from the Soviet Committee for State Security (KGB), to warn (intimidate) people who have broken no laws but are regarded as potential “criminals, terrorists, and radicals.”
President Dmitry Medvedev, who like his Soviet-era predecessor Yuri Andropov, was initially portrayed as a “pro-Western liberal reformer,” was quick to justify his support for the new law. “I would like to turn your attention to the fact that it is our domestic legislation, and not an international act,” Medvedev huffed, adding: “Each country has the right to perfect its own legislation, including that which affects special services. And we will do this.” The legislation was advanced immediately after two female suicide bombers, allegedly from Chechnya, attacked the Moscow subway in March, while its stated objective is to thwart the growth of ideological “radicalism” among young Russians.
“It’s a plain attempt on the part of the FSB to return to the old KGB methods . . . when a person committed no crime but still became an object of KGB attention,” protested Nikita Petrov, a historian who works for the Memorial human rights organization. Another anti-Kremlin activist, Lev Ponomarev of the group For Human Rights, observed: “Liberals in Russia saw the bill as a litmus test for Medvedev and were surprised to hear him take credit for it. This is a pretty important moment.”
No on who recognizes the dialectical nature of the fall of Soviet communism, however, should be surprised by Medvedev’s support for the re-KGB-ization of the Russian secret police. The Russian president is a Soviet Komsomol graduate and a compliant tool in the hands of Russia’s KGB-communist dictator, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
In his 2002 book Blowing up Russia, FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko traces the origin of the 1999 apartment bombings in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buynaksk to the FSB. Four years later, Litvinenko was poisoned with polonium-210, allegedly administered by an active agent of his former employers in the Lubyanka. In a statement dictated from his death bed, he accused Putin by name as his murderer. Along the same theme of an “FSB trace” behind Russia’s domestic terrorism, geopolitical analyst Jeff Nyquist unearths a sinister strategic purpose behind suspect dramas like the Nord-Ost theater and Beslan school hostage crises. This strategic purpose includes greater centralization of power in the Kremlin and the depiction of Islam as a common enemy of both Russia and the USA.
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A Soviet journalist’s recollections of Cuba
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