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"Cartwheel" Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.
All the now-declassified pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Despite CARTWHEEL being located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in a busy city and staffed by military personnel, officials went to great lengths to conceal the true purpose of these towers. They hid in plain sight, appearing to be silos or water towers (they even used civilian water trucks to send crews to some of the towers).
It was only after the cold war ended that the details of the network were declassified.
Obsolete secret infrastructure like CARTWHEEL tower, only revealed decades later, intrigues me not just for its scale and design, but also for the obvious question it gives rise to. If this stuff effectively managed to stay unnoticed for decades, what newer secrets are hiding under our noses today?
@mattblaze@federate.social If you're ever in Scotland you might want to visit the Secret Government Bunker attraction in Fife, just over the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. It's a former ROTOR nuke-hardened air force control centre turned continuity of government HQ, and it's run as a cold war museum. Up top, it's disguised as farm buildings. Underground? Three levels of accommodation for a couple of hundred military and civil servants in event of nuclear war.
@cstross@wandering.shop @mattblaze@federate.social I can second this. It’s only a few miles from where I grew up up. Never knew it was there until years later when I found out a friend’s dad (who worked at the Uni) was on the list of people supposed to head there in the event of nuclear tits up.