Russia appears to have upgraded a nuclear weapons storage bunker in its Kaliningrad enclave, in the latest sign of Moscow’s increased emphasis on nuclear arms in its standoff with Nato, according to a new report.
The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) will publish satellite images on Monday which the group says show a storage facility in the Baltic coast enclave between Poland and Lithuania being deepened and then covered with a new concrete roof in recent months.
“It has all the fingerprints of typical Russian nuclear weapons storage sites,” said Hans Kristensen, the director of the nuclear information project at FAS. “There is a heavy duty external perimeter of multilayered fencing. The bunkers themselves have triple fencing around them as well. These are typical features from all the other nuclear weapons storage sites that we know about in Russia.”
The work on the bunker began in 2016, and the new roof was put on earlier in the summer.
“Its a site we have been monitoring for quite some time and there have been and there have been some upgrades in the past but nothing as dramatic as this one. This is the first time we’ve seen one of the nuclear bunkers being excavated and apparently renovated,” Kristensen said.
“These pictures don’t prove that there are nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad now, but they do show it is an active site,” Kristensen said.
He said it was unclear whether the Russian military already had nuclear warheads at the site, or that they are about to bring them in or whether the facility was being upgraded so that nuclear weapons could be moved in at short notice.
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