When planning the trip to Ukraine, I felt that we needed something else to go with the Chernobyl tour, and after studying the options, and talking to my resident experts, decided to go for the ICBM tour.
Now to put this place into perspective, the area is an underground base, and not just any underground base, it was THE underground base, that from the touch of a few buttons would have dropped half of Europe and North America into nuclear holocaust.
Again as I have mentioned before, I have been to many places that quite frankly let me down, and I thought the base would probably be another site that would fit into this category. Shit, it did not, in any way shape or form. The place is not only still run by the army, but with exception of no longer having a shit ton of nukes, was essentially still a working functioning base run the the military.
Hanging around the “Satan” nuke that would only take 4 rockets to destroy the whole of the USA, massive, huge trucks which would have launched the silo’s and most amazingly the underground control area where the command to launch the rockets would have been given (and looked like a 1970’s time capsule), was quite frankly out of this world. I have always had a space for communist kitsch, standing next to the “red button” (which was actually yellow), was more than cool, it was truly moving.
We returned back to Kiev for a couple of last beers, dinner and then transfer to the train station for my first overnight train (is it also a Vodka train) in the Ukraine, and our transfer first to Odessa, and then onto what is for me the highlight of the trip, Transnitria, the country that does not even exist……
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