AUTHOR'S NOTES

Some interesting items related to locations and technologies used in The Forge of Mars.

FROM The Washington Times April 1, 1997 archived on the FAS website http://www.fas.org/news/russia/1997/bmd970404a.htm

According to a CIA report, construction work is continuing on a "nuclear-survivable, strategic command post at Kosvinsky Mountain," located deep in the Ural Mountains about 850 miles east of Moscow. Satellite photographs of Yamantau Mountain, also located about 850 miles east of Moscow in the Urals near the town of Beloretsk, show continued digging at the "deep underground complex" and new construction at each of the site's above-ground support areas, the CIA stated. Yamantau Mountain means "Evil Mountain" in the local Bashkir language.

"The command post at Kosvinsky appears to provide the Russians with the means to retaliate against a nuclear attack," the CIA report said. "The rationale for the Yamantau complex is unclear." According to the CIA report, the Russians are building or renovating four complexes within Moscow that would be used to house senior Russian government leaders during a nuclear strike. A map published in the report showed new subway construction under way from Victory Park Station in Moscow to Mr. Yeltsin's dacha, some 13 miles west of the Kremlin and about four miles from the Moscow Ring Road.

Additionally, the CIA report stated that a bunker for Russian leaders at Voronovo, about 46 miles south of Moscow, is nearly complete. A second bunker located at Sharapovo, some 34 miles from Moscow, has a special underground subway running directly to it. The subway system for Russian leaders allows for "rapid evacuation of leaders during wartime from Moscow," the CIA said. Presumably, the leadership would then be flown to the Yamantau or Kosvinsky complexes.

According to the report, Mr. Yeltsin and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin endorsed the construction of the bunkers, subways and command posts, and funding for the Yamantau facility was listed for the first time this year in the Russian federal budget.

FROM the June 19, 1997 Congressional Record:

(1) Reports indicate that Russia has been pursuing construction of a massive underground facility of unknown purpose at Yamantau Mountain and the city of Mezhgorye (formerly the settlements of Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16) that is designed to survive a nuclear war and appears to exceed reasonable defense requirements.

(2) The Yamantau Mountain project does not appear to be consistent with the lowering of strategic threats, openness, and cooperation that is the basis of the post-Cold War strategic partnership between the United States and Russia.

(3) Russia appears to have engaged in a campaign to deliberately conceal and mislead the United States about the purpose of the Yamantau Mountain project, as shown by the following:

(A) General and Bashkortostan, People's Deputy Leonid Akimovich Tsirkunov, commandant of Beloretsk-15 and Beloretsk-16, stated in 1991 and 1992 that the purpose of the construction there was to build a mining and ore-processing complex, but later claimed that it was an underground warehouse for food and clothing.

(B) M.Z. Shakiorov, a former communist official in the region, alleged in 1992 that the Yamantau Mountain facility was to become a shelter for the Russian national leadership in case of nulcear war.

(C) Sources of the Segodnya newspaper in 1996 claimed that the Yamantau Mountain project was associated with the so-called `Dead Hand' nuclear retaliatory command and control system for strategic missiles.

FROM various other sources:

...Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, U.S. intelligence sources believe the Russian government has pumped more than $6 billion into Yamantau alone, to construct a sprawling underground complex that spans an area as large as Washington, D.C., inside the Beltway -- some 400 square miles.

In 1998, in a rare public comment, then-Commander of the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) Gen. Eugene Habinger, called Yamantau "a very large complex -- we estimate that it has millions of square feet available for underground facilities. We don't have a clue as to what they're doing there." It is believed to be large enough to house 60,000 persons, with a special air filtration system designed to withstand a nuclear, chemical or biological attack. Enough food and water is believed to be stored at the site to sustain the entire underground population for months on end.

"The only potential use for this site is post-nuclear war," Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., told WorldNetDaily. Bartlett is one of the handful of members of Congress who have closely followed the Yamantau project.The Yamantau Mountain 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."Yamantau Mountain is the largest nuclear-secure project in the world," said Rep. Bartlett. "They have very large train tracks running in and out of it, with enormous rooms carved inside the mountain. It has been built to resist a half dozen direct nuclear hits, one after the other in a direct hole. It's very disquieting that the Russians are doing this when they don't have $200 million to build the service module on the international space station and can't pay housing for their own military people," he said.

The Russians have constructed two entire cities over the site, known as Beloretsk 15 and 16, which are closed to the public, each with 30,000 workers. No foreigner has ever set foot near the site. A U.S. military attaché stationed in Moscow was turned back when he attempted to visit the region a few years ago.

The very little that is known publicly about the site comes from Soviet-era intelligence officers, who defected to Great Britain and the United States. In public testimony before a House Armed Services Subcommittee last October, KGB defector Col. Oleg Gordievsky said the KGB had maintained a separate, top-secret organization, known as Directorate 15, to build and maintain a network of underground command bunkers for the Soviet leadership -- including the vast site beneath Yamantau Mountain. "And what is interesting," said Gordievsky, was that President Yeltsin and Russia's new democratic leaders "are using those facilities, and the same service is still running the same facility, like it was 10, 15 years ago."

Yamantau Mountain is so secret that only a handful of Russian government officials knows about it, says Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who speaks Russian and travels frequently to Russia, chairing a congressional working group that discusses strategic issues with counterparts from the Russian Duma.