Comment by varjag
1 day ago
A unique accumulation of workers (‘colony’) of the wood ant Formica polyctena Först., trapped within an old bunker for storing nuclear weapons, is described. The source of the ‘colony’ is a large colony nesting outdoors, on top of the bunker. Individuals that have fallen down through a ventilation pipe are not able to find their way back to the mother nest.
The dictatorship of proletariat but for ants, and inside a Soviet bunker of course. Sometimes I see why people find the idea that there's no God incredulous.
> Two underground two-level ammunition bunkers, 300 metres apart (26 m × 42 m each), which constituted the core of the base and where nuclear weapons were kept, have survived (Sadowski 2011, Rutko 2015).
Interestingly this is a "Soviet" bunker in western Poland. A Warsaw Pact bunker?
Also, I didn't think that Soviet policy was to store nuclear weapons in Poland - not sure if this quote is accurate or if this was just more common than I had thought?
It was likely similar to the warhead storage bunkers in Czech Republic (or Czechoslovaki back then), most likely intended for tactical nuclear weapons, like Scuds or maybe for aircraft as well:
https://www.expats.cz/czech-news/article/top-secret-cold-war...
https://www.rferl.org/a/24993733.html
https://www.euronews.com/2021/07/18/czech-cold-war-depot-for...
Of course the Soviets (who were exclusively running and guarding those bunkers back then) never confirmed what they were used to or if they contained live nuclear weapons. But it is clear that this was the intended use case, given the storage conditions, the expens to build & run those as well as how heavily they were guarded.
Same in Hungary: https://worldwidepanorama.org/wwp1208/BanfalvyZoltan-5060.ht...
"This is a special storage facility, type Granit 2 (or 3), designed for A-bombs."
Not sure if it's true, but the article says these nukes were meant for Italy.
I find these bunkers fascinating. I've always wanted to explore one.
Amazing how much money was wasted on these only to be staffed for years and then abandoned.
6 replies →
People think of Warsaw Pact as an alliance akin to NATO but opposite. In reality it was essentially Soviet Army padded with national units of subjugated countries. For instance there is NATO HQ as everyone knows but Warsaw Pact headquarters never existed: the chain of command started in Ministry of Defense in Moscow.
And yes tactical nukes were forward deployed to most Pact countries.
By "nuclear weapon" most people think of a bomb, but it can also mean the non-bomb portions of nuclear delivery systems such as rocket/missile bodies and aircraft. In times of rising conflict they could "forward-deploy" the warheads from Russia to be mated to rockets and such already in the field. So the peacetime "no nukes in Poland" policy can be true even though "nuclear weapons" were already waiting in bunkers there.
The west did basically the same thing. Not every "nuclear weapon bunker" at every American base actually held warheads.
In the Czechoslovak case those bunkers were definitely for the warheads - far too small for a whole Scud missile, air conditioned, etc. The delivery mechanisms were notionally conventional & are documented as stationed elsewhere.
It was in those bunkers where the warheads would be (were ?) stored in the time of crisis as a forward deployment.
The ants are two weeks away from going nuclear.
Ant expert E.O.Wilson once said of communism: "Great idea. Wrong species"
Funny you say that when literally a few stories away on HN first page, you have this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50388122
What does the "dictatorship of the proletariat" have to do with a bunch of ants falling through a hole in the ground? Is it because worker ants are called "worker" ants? Is a dictatorship when you fall down a hole and are left without a queen or any resources?
God could be imagined illustrating why we need queens and resources in a Soviet bunker because the Soviets believed there shouldn't be queens, or resources? Did the Soviets actually believe that there shouldn't be any natural resources? Are human "queens" our only source of reproduction?
This is really supposed to be an instructive metaphor for what happens when people who work are left to their own devices in a barren place, and that's supposed to make us reflect on the Soviet Union?
Don't worry, I know the answer: They're called "workers" and the situation is bad. The Soviets said that they were a society of "workers" and the Soviets were bad. Deep.
I grew up in the Soviet Union so am entitled to whatever dab on communism can come up with.
name checks out