"Duga" radar guarded our sky for 20 years

During the Cold War, the opposing sides threatened each other, mainly with missiles with nuclear warheads. However, the leaders of the countries that led the opposing blocs and possessed the most powerful arsenals of deadly weapons, namely, the USSR and the US, understood that a possible success in the event of a war transition from the "cold" to the "hot" stage is possible only if the majority of the weapons issued by the enemy Missiles will be detected and intercepted in time, and the factor of surprise - leveled. So the notion of "early detection" arose.

Works were conducted from both sides, they were top secret. The very level of the country's readiness to repulse a nuclear attack was a state secret no less, and maybe even greater than the number of warheads and their means of delivery.

In the USSR, the special research institute DAR, headed by the general designer FA, was involved in the development of systems for detecting ballistic missile launches. Kuzminsky, since the 1960s.

When designing the system, the disturbance signal reflected from the ionosphere, which occurs at the moment of start-up and generated by the nozzle flame, was used as the main factor in the detection of hostile rockets.

By 1970, the experimental Duga radar, which was the name given to the project, was almost ready and tested on Soviet missiles scheduled to be launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome, the Pacific Fleet ships and ground-launched launchers in the Far East. The radar showed good results in conditions of low level of ionospheric noise. The government decided to build a powerful Duga radar in the Mykolayiv region. The place was chosen not casually, this station could control the space over the entire Black Sea, Turkey, Israel and a significant part of Europe within a radius of 3000 kilometers. As the further foreign policy situation could unfold at that moment, one could only guess.

The overhead radar "Duga" stood on alert on the day of the 54th anniversary of the October Revolution. Despite the situation of extreme secrecy, it was difficult to completely eliminate information leakage, the tracking station had huge dimensions, the antenna height was 135 meters, and the length was hundreds of meters. In addition, the radar Duga created ethereal noise in the form of impulses resembling a knock, for which it received, almost immediately, the nickname of the "Russian woodpecker" among the military NATO countries engaged in electronic intelligence. However, some awareness of the probable enemy may have been useful. It restrained excessive arrogance and militancy and cooled hotheads in the Pentagon, excited by the emerging preponderance in the number of nuclear charges, as well as the availability of the cruise missiles of the Tomahawk trajectory, which it was difficult to detect by conventional radar.

The Duga radar was very energy-intensive, so the next two of its samples were mounted near the power plants. After the accident in Chernobyl, one of them had to be shut down for obvious reasons. The low stability of the received signal at a high level of ionospheric interference made it necessary to abandon the operation of the other two. Their place was occupied by early detection systems of a new generation.