This peaceful forest in Ukraine is home to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, established in 1986 after the world's worst nuclear disaster. But it also contains another Cold War era legacy with a far more sinister and mysterious reputation: the Duga radar.
The peaceful untouched forest north of Ukraine's capital, Kiev, is a perfect spot to enjoy the outdoors -- save for one fact.
It still stands a towering 150 meters high and stretches almost 700 meters in length. But, left to rot in the radioactive winds of Chernobyl, it's now in a sad state of industrial decay. Even decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the story behind the Duga still poses more questions than answers, its true purpose not fully understood.Construction of the Duga began in 1972 when Soviet scientists looking for ways to mitigate long-range missile threats came up with the idea of building a huge over-the-horizon-radar, that would bounce signals off the ionosphere to peer over the Earth's curvature.
On Soviet maps, the Duga radar was marked as a children's camp (there's even a bizarre bus stop on the road to one facility decorated with a bear mascot from the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.Legend has it that Phil Donahue, one of the first US journalists to be granted access to Chernobyl after the disaster, asked his official guide about the surreal sight of the Duga on the horizon and was told it was an unfinished hotel.
Such wild speculations were further fueled by the Soviet Union's denial of the very existence of the radar -- it was a children's camp after all. Due to the Duga's top-secret status, all the documents about its operation were either destroyed or archived in Moscow, a state of things that continues to the present day. The antenna's vital components transported to Moscow or spirited away by looters.
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