“CARTWHEEL” Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.
All the pixels, with a secret bunker buried under each one, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768
#photography
“CARTWHEEL” Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.
All the pixels, with a secret bunker buried under each one, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768
#photography
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 Cool photo. I think technical secrets are probably easier to keep that operational ones. Building secret radio towers as contengencies against a nuclear attack is probably a pretty easy one to keep, but take, for example, my favorite secret project, the Glomar Explorer. They were able to build that huge subtrafuge ship in complete secret, but as soon as they used it to grab the sub, the whole thing became public in the press because it was such a “cool” secret.