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That's an AUTOVON switching center.[1] There were at least 38 of those centers in the US. They were located in places some distance from major cities and military targets. They were hardened telephone central offices, but with many more redundant links between switches than the commercial system. So this system really was intended to survive a nuclear war.
The technology was Western Electric's 1ESS (#1 Electronic Switching System), and all 4-wire out to the handsets, so that conference calls would work clearly without feedback. 1ESS was a very bulky system. It was basically a pair of large mainframe computers running a big dumb switch fabric. The switch fabric is analog and electromechanical, using reed switches with a ferrite element so they stay in the last state to which they were set. That's why these were such big installations, even though they didn't have a huge number of lines.
The underground sites were primarily for Long Lines equipment, i.e. L-carrier Coaxial repower, regen, cross-connect and HVAC and power continuity for these. You can see in the illustration that switching at its least efficient was maybe 1/4 of the facility (lowest level), L (and TD MW) would be a bit more dense but similar floor space on first level. These multistory sites had a lot of extra room for training rooms, service bureau, and some nod toward continuity in terms of sheltering a number of people with some token supplies although if you look at enough pictures over time it doesn't appear like it was ever taken very seriously... ultimately I think these just turned out to be a way AT&T and the DoD came up with to get the US Government to more heavily subsidize Long Lines network construction.
Switching of copper end lines would often happen closer to the user, i.e. on base although some sites did have switching due to favorable proximity (i.e. Soccoro, N.M) or presumably function like a tandem (maybe this site?). You can see a little of a 1A ESS in this video (https://www.facebook.com/CheshireVolFireDept/videos/a-brief-...) and maybe some 5ESS in the background as well although it is too brief for me to tell.
Some undergrounds were dual purposed for Microwave pathing and cross connect (like this linked one), but most microwave was instead in above ground hardened facilities elsewhere for path diversity.
Some undergrounds had Echo Fox transceivers and switching http://www.coldwar-c4i.net/Echo-Fox/index.html.
Project Offices are an interesting related rabbit hole to pursue http://www.coldwar-c4i.net/ATT_Project/index.html.
Source: I own an L-3 regen bunker and have done a lot of research on them.
> and maybe some 5ESS in the background as well although it is too brief for me to tell.
The frame at 2:22 looks to me like it has a 5E in view.
They also had Number 5 Crossbar switches as well, the switching fabric wasn't huge in size, like I've seen what the frames look like, ESS was still much smaller than the crossbar that preceded it, and not that much physically larger than a comparable 5ESS
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How deep did they bury the wires?
Were they run full depth from point to point?
It would vary by terrain and land use (e.g. agricultural), but generally just 2-3 feet deep by vibratory plow. Deeper emplacement and directional drilling were used as required to handle obstacles. For most L-carrier the entire en-route infrastructure was below ground, but it was more extensive than just the cable, with active repeaters in manholes required at 2-mile intervals for L-4. L-4 also required an "equalizing repeater" about every 50 miles, which was installed in a manhole but had a shed on top to facilitate technicians adjusting the equalization. Main stations, such as this one, were required every 150 miles.
Google "L4 transcontinental cable", but the majority of the long lines network was the famously known horn antennas on towers for FDD microwave point to point links in the 6GHz band.
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I’m surprised they didn’t use crossbar electromechanical switches for EMP resistance.
They did - it wasn't all ESS
http://autovon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/BELL-LAB-RECOR...
These AT&T facilities were hardened against EMP to the era's military design standards, and AT&T participated in validation experiments using both actual nuclear detonations and EMP simulators. I've never seen any indication that AT&T thought the electromechanical switches had an advantage in this context, but it's an interesting question if they performed any evaluation. In general, though, EMP protection was done at the "envelope" of the facility, and equipment inside of the facility did not need to itself be EMP hardened. Hardening of the facility was achieved mostly by a shielding system embedded in the outside walls, and of course AT&T had already performed considerable research into suppressing transients on the outside plant due to lightning.
Crossbar switches were indeed in use in the AUTOVON network for simple scheduling reasons, a number of AUTOVON switches were installed before the 1ESS was ready. Eventually all of the 5XBs were replaced by 1ESS. Some Automatic Electric switches were used at AUTOVON sites outside of Bell territory, these were at least semi-custom (AE just called them "the AUTOVON switch") electromechanical machines.
The entire underground structure is an engineered Faraday cage constructed from a tremendous amount of steel rebar, copper mesh, and a central grounding and bonding network.
As a Brit that map at the bottom is very confusing. A Bristol not to far from a Glastonbury, ok yeah, that makes sense but the map mustn't be north-oriented. Oh, and what's Manchester doing so close to Glastonbury, and that's not where Durham would be, or Norwich, or New Haven. Hmm.. and I didn't think we had a _New_ London.
https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354...
Also, Cheshire is a county in the north of England so the whole article was very confusing from the get go as to where this station was located. Here it is on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/aEWT2L6QYqntYDDz5
Bolton, Kensington, Oxford, Coventry, and—slightly left field—Berlin are also nearby.
The 42 degrees north goes through the northern US and northern Spain, but is well south of England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42nd_parallel_north The New is also a hint aka New York, New Jersey, etc.
It’s a map of Connecticut, USA.
There’s a reason they call the area New England. New York was New Amsterdam before the Brits took it over.
Zoom out a bit and you get a whole bunch of Manchesters, and none of them had a Factory Records.
Old New York was once New Amsterdam...
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way
… Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, oh Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks
For these wondering, this is the song
https://youtu.be/0XlO39kCQ-8?si=SPHrV99reR579yPn
Very catchy, it was re popularized by a netflix series a few years ago, j don't remember the name lf the series tho
Umbrella Academy? And Tiny Toons many years earlier.
Byzantion!
Byzantium
It's a Thracian settlement, and it had probably once been called Lygos too.
There were probably humans living here, although perhaps not in a large settlement, much earlier, it's a pretty nice place for humans to live.
That's why it's called New England. Here out west, most of the anglo town names are the names of settlers (with exceptions like Richmond née upon Thames.)
I'm with you. I started reading and was like "wait.. this is not the Cheshire I know of - where has this been hiding".. Then on the map: Lebanon and Brooklyn.
Also Wallingford. I bet thats nothing like the Wallingford I know of (Oxfordshire Town)
So many places in the USA have matching British names I had to check to see if Brooklyn was one of them, but looks like it's named for a Dutch town, which makes sense.
Yeah, that’s a funny spelling of Breukelen, now an exurb of Amsterdam, NL.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/8o6xc5/r...
This sign is just for the singular state of Maine. Notice the two distinct "Sweden"s, and that ignores "New Sweden" we have way up north.
The colonists were not creative with names.
I stared at Google Earth for a while, using the 41:30 and 73 as a guide, but wasn't able to pinpoint the location of the site. With these huge vents, it shouldn't be too hard to find where this site was located.
Anyone an idea?
Well we wouldn't want the Russians to find out too would we.
Would guess you don't have a Mohawk either.
Wait until you find out how to correctly pronounce “Worcester.”
Wait until you learn we here in Connecticut also have hundreds of miles of stone walls, just like England!
Anyone else in awe at all the infrastructure, systems, etc that were setup especially due to the Cold War? Things like Operation Looking Glass, keeping a staffed plane in the air, 24/7/365 for nearly 30 years, all these kind of hardening projects, it's crazy to me how much work and how many decades it spanned.
And that's just the stuff we now can openly read about. I can't imagine all the systems and redundancies in place right now... but probably a lot more digital with analog backup only.
The thing that really drops my jaw is the handwaving conjecture that the doomsday risk level has decreased a lot since then.
It's not handwaving conjecture, it is cold calculation.
Russia has a nuclear triad the same as the US.
1. Russia's submarine forces have been gutted since the Cold War. Poor training and maintenance has led to a slew of launch failures in recent years and analysis of their deployment tempo seems to indicate only a minimum number of submarines are deployed at any given time.
2. The long range strategic bomber forces of the Russian Aerospace Force are so outdated and vulnerable to western air defense systems that they rarely if ever enter the airspace of Ukraine, with the Tu-160 supersonic bomber lobbing cruise missiles from well outside Ukraine's air defense zone, the Tu-95 doing the same, and the Tu-22 only targeting areas not protected by Patriot missiles.
3. Aging systems, poor maintenance, and a lack of adequate funding has severely hampered Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces. They lack the precision to ensure a favorable outcome in the event of a nuclear war because they were designed for scenarios where dozens if not hundreds of warhead were used on individual area targets in an age where there were tens of thousands of warheads available for use.
All of Russia's "superhypersonic killer nuclear-powered unstoppable death machine weapons test" rhetoric is an attempt to fool the US into believing that they have something up their sleeve because they know that the US knows that each of the three spokes of their triad have been degraded so much. Russia also knows they can't afford to rebuild their forces, so wonderweapons it is.
They can't even build enough radios to equip all of their ground forces in Ukraine with communications gear and their megaweapons programs are hollow vanity projects.
Do not mistake any of this for hubris. Russia can still launch nuclear weapons and any such usage would be disastrous.
The doomsday scenarios at the height of the Cold War where 40,000 Soviet warheads could be mustered for deployment by a variety of difficult to stop systems to be met with a response of 20,000 US warheads thus irradiating the entire northern hemisphere and dooming humanity to extinction is all but impossible.
So unless the definition of "doomsday" has changed from "the extinction of all of humanity" to "a really shitty time where hundreds of thousands die in an instant" the doomsday risk level has indeed decreased.
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This does not belong on HN.
Pretty sure an anonymized WW3 scenario belongs in a Cold War thread. If someone doesn't want to match the wildcard in people's minds for a person that would not credibly pull the trigger in this hypothetical, they can run for governor instead of president.
Wow, that GGP message was the first time I got brigaded on HN. Must have hit a nerve.
2022, nay, 2014 should have been a wake-up call that World War III was underway.
My fave is SAGE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environm...
Truly astonishing amount of money for defense against airplane.
Obsoleted soon after by the advent of ICBMs.
This webpage is truly the peak of webpage design. It's got everything you need, nothing you don't, will load nearly instantly on basically any internet connection.
I was just having a conversation the other day about the demise of niche websites. There really are only about 20 websites on the internet anyway, rather than the millions and millions of vertical sites maintained by people passionate about their subject matter.
More info on the Long Lines system, for those interested:
http://personal.garrettfuller.org/blog/2018/01/19/att-long-l...
That background though... ( https://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/da3386ad-a465-4e41-834e-354... )
Those MIRVs come in kinda fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZM3y5qpMgY
Mach 23, as noted toward the end of that video.
In fully glory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...
MIRV re-entry test...
This is the kind of information I read hn for. Really fascinating stuff that I probably wouldn't know about otherwise.
> Clothing was available for contaminated workers including dozens of boxes of brand new Converse sneakers, c. 1968!
Why would the workers be contaminated?
Struggling to understand the purpose of this station, at the top it says coax but why all the fancy cooling and contamination protection?
These facilities were designed to be hardened so as to survive a nuclear war. The air intakes were presumably needed to provide cooling for the communication equipment inside and decontamination was for any workers who needed to visit after the outside has all been contaminated with nuclear fallout
This facility is what's called a tandem office in the old long distance telephone network here in the US. The idea was that it formed a link in a routing chain between two end offices when a long-distance call was placed.
Cheshire, CT, also happened to be an AUTOVON site, which carried with it military and national security significance. This is why it was hardened against nuclear attack, including the air handling augmentations, decontamination shower, gamma ray detection equipment, and so on.
First lines:
> The Cheshire ATT facility is an underground complex originally built in 1966. It was an underground terminal and repeater station for the hardened analog L4 carrier cable (coax) that went from Miami to New England carrying general toll circuits and critical military communication circuits
Critical military communication circuits implies it was meant to survive a nuclear attack.
The site was built to survive a nearby nuclear attack.
You mean "couldn't they just reboot the server remotely using the terminal on their Mac after the crazed fools in the White House and the Kremlin annihilated civilization through nuclear holocaust in 1968?"
Well, all I can say is thank goodness we're not in that situation today so that people don't understand the "why"s.
Aren't we?
Makes me depressed to think that I'll never again enjoy the crisp, clear communication of a landline phone call.
The "best" nostalgic connection would be mid 1990s to whenever 2000s ISDN where you have end to end PCM on a nailed down circuit switched network.
There are a lot of issues to deal with going 2 wire to 4 wire to some kind of carrier and back again in an all analog network, and once you introduce some kind of hybrid network like PCM carrier and TDM switching any remaining analog links are only a liability.
Modern codecs can pack a lot more quality into less bits and with FEC.. so an HD Voice VoLTE or Opus VoIP call are technically "better" than anything used for baseband voice on circuit switched networks in the past. You could easily recreate circuits with dedicated fiber wavelengths these days and have the best of all worlds.
This is fake nostalgia.
There were a lot of places in the world (and still are many places in the world) where the copper phone lines are anything but crisp and clear - lots of noise and hums and clicks and static. That's the rule more than the exception in some places. Now these intrusions are typically not enough to disrupt a voice call, but they were a major issue using modems and DSL.
a modern call phone call, does actually meet or exceed the quality from a landline. I know because I still had a landline until 2019 - and I have a VoIP one now.
“dozens of boxes of brand new Converse sneakers, c. 1968”
Wow! New-in-box 1968 Converse sneakers must be worth a fortune. AT&T (or whoever owns the site now days) is sitting on a gold mine here!
Those boxes of brand new Gillette razors are worth a fair amount too!
My dad would have been very interested in these photos. He worked for Western Electric and spent most of his time working on Long Lines installations in NYC.
The toilets are on springs to survive the shock wave. My acquaintance long time ago told me that in their deep (much deeper than in this article) underground USSR military communication center the whole floors were on some kind of springs and shock absorbers.
There's a bunker outside of Ottawa Canada, intended to house a select core of the federal government during and after a nuclear horrocaust, that is (at least) 10 storeys of underground on a sprung foundation. It's now a museum to the cold war open to the public (and worth a visit if you're in the area) and you can actually see the massive foundation springs.
Also, they run escape rooms where you're caught in the bunker during a nuclear event, which would be kind of cool.
NORAD headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain: they hollowed out a mountain, and installed an entire complex mounted on springs.
This was not just done for fancy bunkers like NORAD headquarters but was common practice for telecommunication stations in many countries.
Hollowing a mountain?
Just in case anyone is wondering what kind of shock waves a nearby nuclear blast would generate, watch this video of a 1-megaton test in central Nevada. You can drive right up to this point today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ETHnsKnKiA
That music... o_O
A lot of equipment in submarines is spring-mounted also, for better survivial of depth-charge shocks.
All I can think as I read this is how much education and medical treatment this could have paid for
Not that it wasn't sadly necessary... but it seems a waste of human endeavour
I'm afraid we may have to refurbish these ... quickly.
Why?
I bet the late Robert “Ozzie” Osband (Richard Cheshire, The Cheshire Catalyst) would have loved to hack into there.
https://infocondb.org/presenter/richard-cheshire-the-cheshir...
>*The Cheshire Catalyst (@Cheshire2600)* (Richard Cheshire) was the last editor of the notorious TAP Newsletter of the 1970s and 1980s. (TAP was a predecessor of 2600 Magazine.) In his "share the knowledge" spirit, he has volunteered at every HOPE conference since the first one in 1994. His PHonePHriendly.Com sets up web pages meant to be read on mobile phone web browsers, and allows him to delude himself that he's still into phones as a phreak.
I never knew him, but Jason Scott did what seemed like a nice job of memorializing him after his recent death:
One wonders if there is not a better way to build these kind of hardened structure.just build it on the surface, then "sink" them with water and ultrasonic vibrations to sink it. Make it a serious of cone shaped structures and voila.
Amazing. I live in the next town over and had absolutely no idea about this. Thanks for sharing!
I'd love to know if the shock defensive construction (springs on piping, toilets, you-name-it) was tested by deep structures planted close to the underground tests so they had higher confidence this would actually "work"
Not deep structures, but yes:
Project "Faultless": <https://yewtu.be/watch?v=9R2Ok4_Ze3g>.
A surface structure mounted on springs was directly above the 1 MT shot, which was 3,000 ft (~900m) below the surface.
Bet those all stars would make bank on ebay.
Love seeing the old civil defense crystal dosimeters and the charger lower down. I have an old CDV-741 kicking around.
Why was there a gamma ray detector?
This other page goes into a little more detail on the detection system: https://coldwar-ct.com/Blast_Detectors.html
“Most sites included Gamma detectors that were designed to detect the radiation wave as well. They were redundant systems, any detection, overpressure or Gamma would button-up the site at which point signals were sent to all Continental U.S. sites that a blast was detected, where it was, the size of the blast and wind speed and direction. Sites within 250 miles of any detection would go to Auto-Lock down.”
I wonder how sensitive they were/are. Can you goof on them with a portable medical gamma ray source?
That sounds like a fantastic way to have a SWAT team kick down your door
I guess. I am just trying to think of the funniest thing a KGB operative could do in his free time.
Gamma rays are an early danger from the fallout from a nuclear blast.
Gamma rays also travel faster than the other destructive waveform. Much of the expansive destruction from a nuclear bomb is due to "over pressure", and these facilities have spring loaded blast valves that quickly snap shut when signaled via the gamma detector or a manual control to limit it from entering the protected zone.
Bunkers have different grading in terms of blast resistance and most of the AT&T bunkers were engineered for something like 5, 10, 15, or 20 mile air burst strikes of certain warhead yield.
The AT&T bunkers are mostly far removed from population centers such that a direct nuclear strike would be a waste of a perfectly good nuke. In reality, a directly targeted conventional warhead or sabotage would be plenty effective in causing major service disruption so I think a lot of the realities for survivability would be aftermath repair capabilities.
Likely having something to do with this being a bunker meant to effectively endure a nuclear attack
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They used to be (valve systems designed to protect from shockwave were installed) but are no longer ;)
Looks like a Fallout Vault
These facilities were not cheap to design and build. Obsolete now.
Crafted by Rajat
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