Plokstine Missile Base & the Hill of Crosses
Day Seven - The Baltics - 2024
An unforgettable experience at a Soviet nuclear missile base followed by a visit to the world-famous Hill of Crosses.
Editor’s Comment: The terms “Baltics” and “Baltic” are complicated: geopolitically, the “Baltic states” refer to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the “Baltic region” refers to those states which border the Baltic Sea, and the “Baltic peoples” are those who speak Baltic languages, primarily Latvian and Lithuanian. I apply the term “Baltics” in this travelogue to apply to those states of Baltic region I traveled through, in this case Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Additionally, certain characters have been transliterated to be compatible with the fonts used on this website.
1. Plokstine Missile Base #1
On 31 December 1962, Plokstine Missile Base was loaded with four R-12 Dvina medium-range rockets carrying megaton-class thermonuclear warheads and became fully operational; it was decommissioned in June 1978.
First thing in the morning, we crossed the border into Lithuania and headed towards the Cold War Museum at the former Plokstine Missile Base of the Soviet Union, in the present day Zemaitijos National Park. The main attraction of the Cold War Museum is the missile silo of an R-12 Dvina rocket, but the site also has incredibly in-depth history information boards (widely in English), as well as an expansive underground bunker complex to explore. But before we get to all that, a history lesson about the site.
On 11 June 1957, the United States successfully tested its first nuclear-capable missile prototype, the SM-65A Atlas-A rocket, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This resulted in a period of rapid design, prototyping, and testing of nuclear-capable missiles by the U.S. and the Soviet Union; for the U.S., this initial effort culminated on 8 August 1961 when the final prototype of the Atlas family, the SM-65F, was tested. What made the Atlas-F such a significant advancement was that it could be fueled and launched from an underground bunker.
This revelation resulted in an incredible escalation of weapon and launch facility construction, as well as the development of the so-called “medium-range ballistic missile”, or MRBM. The United States’ MRBM of the early 1960s was the PGM-19 Jupiter, while the Soviet Union had developed the similarly-capable R-12 Dvina. These MRBMs were not capable of traveling between the United States and the Soviet Russia like intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); rather, they could only travel inside one continent but they could do so quickly and with less chance of retaliation. For example, the U.S. placed Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey in 1961, and the Soviet Union (very famously) placed R-12s in Cuba in 1962.
As mentioned, to support this effort base construction was happening at an alarming rate (for example, the U.S. was building nearly two missile launch silos per day for many years during the 1960s), and one such Soviet base was Plokstine. Commissioned in 1960, its location in the far west of the Soviet Union was ideal for reaching European NATO states; furthermore, the area was heavily forested and scarcely populated so few folks would notice the building activity taking place. It is also purported that the soil in this region is easily excavated.
Plokstine Missile Base was the first underground nuclear missile base constructed by the Soviet Union.
10,000 workers -mostly Estonian- built Plokstine, digging the majority of the vast underground complex by hand. Lithuanians were not selected for construction duty at Plokstine, nor were they often stationed there; this was a result of Soviet paranoia which drove a suspicion that locals couldn’t be trusted with military secrets.
Far and away the most impressive feats of construction were the missile silos themselves. A tiny tilt in the silos would result in the payload not traveling accurately to its destination; therefore, each silo was dug and its walls poured to have a precise 90-degree perpendicular surface. Moreover, the silos were completed -again, by hand- in less than a year.
As mentioned, the base opened in December 1962 and served watch silently until June 1978.
The Cold War Museum opened on the site in 2012.
2. Plokstine Missile Base #2
Plokstine was one of the most heavily guarded facilities the world has ever known: in addition to four layers of alarmed barrier fences -one of which was capable of delivering a fatal 1700 volt shock- the facility was patrolled by over 300 armed security personnel.
Walking through the Cold War Museum today, you are easily taken aback by the expanse of the facility.It is like a small village entirely underground; this was, obviously, done on purpose to avoid detection. The facility consists of at least a dozen rooms, which served functions such as fuel and oxidizer storage, electrical generation, water pumping, rest quarters, communications, and -of course- launch. These rooms are located in the so-called “Technological Unit” which sits between the four silos. The facility is accessed by a gigantic steel security door at the bottom of a short staircase.
Presently, the rooms have history exhibits, are restored to what they would have looked like during the 1960s and 1970s, or are unrestored. It will take you a couple of hours to see every nook and cranny and read each information sign. Compare this to a much, much smaller U.S. nuclear launch silo, like the one at the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site I visited in 2017.
It is worth noting that, despite the Soviet Union’s incredible attempts at discretion, the site was detected by United States intelligence as early as 1964, not the mid- or late 1970s as claimed by some sources. I rarely show my work on this website (it’s a photography website, not an academic text), but in this case extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: so here is a now-declassified February 1964 Top Secret report by the CIA which shows the site on page 4 / PDF page 5. You can compare the sketch of the site to the site in Google Maps if you’d like.
3. Plokstine Missile Base #3
9 officers and 22 enlisted personnel worked in six-hour shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Crew at the site -which in total numbered hundreds of soldiers- were broadly divided into four functional areas: missile installation and targeting, control systems and electronics, fuel, and oxidizer. These functions roughly aligned with the four states of readiness of an R-12:
Readiness Condition 4: missile is stored but without fuel or gyroscopes; requires 205 minutes from go order to launch,
Readiness Condition 3: the missile is stored with the gyros and warhead installed; requires 140 minutes to launch,
Readiness Condition 2: the missile is installed on the launch pad; fuel connections are made, but no fuel was pumped into the rocket and has a 60-minute response time, and,
Readiness Condition 1: fully-fueled missile only requires oxidizer; requires 30 minutes to launch.
As the result of an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, the launch of the MRBM required two keys to be turned on separate consoles simultaneously.
4. Plokstine Missile Base #4
There are 1,296,000 seconds of arc in a 360-degree circle - the missiles at Plokstine had to be aimed to within 2 seconds of arc to be accurate
Before you exit the museum, you are given a real treat - you can step inside a Soviet missile silo. Here, you can see the giant door above you …
5. Plokstine Missile Base #5
Plokstine’s four missile silos are 25 meters / 82 feet deep and 5 meters / 16 feet wide.
… And the gigantic silo tube beneath you. It is quite an amazing feeling to be standing in such a place.
We all agreed the visit to the Cold War Museum was one of the top highlights of the trip, and if you are anywhere nearby it is absolutely worth going out of your way to see it.
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Now back to the travelogue!
6. Hill of Crosses #1
The Hill of Crosses is home to over 100,000 crosses covering an area of approximately .5 hectares / 1.2 acres.
En route to Kaunas, we made a quick stop at the Hill of Crosses. While, yes, it is just that -a hill of crosses- it is also a true testament to perseverance against authority. First, it is believed that the site is located on the remnants of a hill fort destroyed by the Russian Empire during the 1831 Uprising and that the first crosses were placed in memory of the failed revolutionaries who perished there. Second, the site itself was banned by the Soviet Union as being anti-communist and was bulldozed no fewer than three times, but was rebuilt by locals each time despite steep penalties for trespassing on the site.
There is no access fee for the site, although a nearby parking lot does charge a fee. It is a busy site, but is large enough and has several twists and turns, so you can easily escape and find solitude if that’s what you’re after.
This certainly shouldn’t be your only stop in Lithuania (I won’t say names, but you can figure it out…), but I certainly recommend stopping by if you’re passing through the area.
Fourteen photographs of the Hill of Crosses follow.
