I suggest you find out some more details about how this antenna was built, how it guarded the world and why it was known in the world as a “Russian woodpecker,” said one of the creators of the “Duga”, chief designer of the modern ZGRLS “Container”, Ph. D. in physics and mathematics Valery Alebastrov …
In response to the appearance in the United States of a plan to bombard Moscow, Leningrad, the Urals, and other industrial regions in the USSR, they began to look for an adequate answer. And then, in the mid-1960s, designer Vladislav Repin and academician Aleksandar Mints proposed to create an early warning system for a missile attack (SPRN).
It was decided to create a system of three echelons.
Space, the development of which was led by the recently departed academician Savin, consisted of satellites that recorded torches from rocket launches in the infrared range. The over-the-horizon location also tracked torches, but in the radio range. The third echelon consists of Daryal-type ground-based radars that track ballistic missiles on their way to our territory. Three systems are needed in order to strengthen the responsibility for making decisions in the event of the so-called falsehood - a false response of the system. At the same time, the United States began to create a similar system.
Later, Margaret Thatcher would say that the creation of an early warning system prevented a nuclear war, and this was so.
However, scientifically based physical methods for this system have not yet been developed, we took a big risk. A rocket launched from the USA reaches our territory in 20 minutes. The radars at our border will detect the missile just five minutes before it hits Moscow. Therefore, an early warning system was needed, capable of fixing a rocket three to four minutes after launch.
Promotional video:
Guglielmo Marconi in one of the experiments put his receiver on a ship sailing from England to the United States. To the surprise of everyone, excellent signal transmission from the shore was recorded along the route, although theoretical calculations gave an estimate of the maximum radio transmission range of 200 km. The fact is that at that time physicists did not know about the existence of the ionosphere and used Sommerfeld's theory of diffraction in their calculations.
Later experiments showed that layers of the ionosphere located at an altitude of 300 km reflect short radio waves.
Therefore, waves can bend around the entire globe many times. This principle was used back in 1946 by the scientist Nikolai Kabanov, who proposed the idea of early detection of aircraft. To do this, we must send a wave with the help of a radio source, which will be reflected from the ionosphere, then the plane, and catch it with a receiver. Moreover, depending on the frequency of the radio wave, we can “see” different parts of the earth's surface beyond the horizon.
In principle, thanks to the Doppler effect, we can see everything that moves: planes, trains, ships and other targets - at a distance of 900 to 4000 km.
The reflected signal is received at receiving positions near the transmitting antenna. On the receiving antenna, the reflected signal is analyzed and it is determined what the target is, its coordinates, at what speed and where it is moving. But if the aircraft itself reflects the radio wave, then at the launching rocket plasma formations are reflected from combustion products ranging in size from 1 to 10 km, depending on the altitude. If an aircraft is flying, then its reflected signal is very narrow, only 0.3 Hz wide, while the rocket has 80 Hz, while its speed is more than 1 km / s.
At the end of the 1960s, an experimental sample of the ZGRLS was made in Ukraine, in Nikolaev, without it scientists could theorize for another 20 years. The first results were obtained, after which, against the background of the threat from the United States, it was decided to build two combat stations at once: one in Chernobyl, the second in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. They covered the territory of the United States, where 940 missiles with nuclear warheads aimed at the USSR were based. It is a mistake to believe that the Chernobyl radar station was built next to the nuclear power plant, since it required a lot of energy, the location was chosen for other reasons.
It was clear that the conditions for detecting American missiles in the west of the country and in the Far East changed depending on the time of day. This is due to the so-called polar cap in the ionosphere, which interferes with the passage of radio waves. Therefore, when the probability of detection is maximum in Chernobyl during the day, it is minimal at night in the Far East, and vice versa. By the way, when the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was built, its energy was enough "above the roof", including the countries of people's democracies in Eastern Europe. In 1982, both Duga stations were put into operation. Collected giant antennas on the ground and mounted with portal cranes.
The antenna height was 140 m, 200 million Soviet rubles were spent on the creation of the ZGRLS system. The consumption of the transmitter was 1.5 MW, the station itself - 500 kW.
By the way, immediately after its construction, the Americans put it in their pants. They began to trumpet all over the world that these stations jam all communication services, radio signals, all air. Offensively, they called our stations "Russian woodpecker". The scandal reached the diplomatic level, after which we sent the ship of the USSR Academy of Sciences "Professor Zubov" with receivers to the United States, measured the noise level and submitted to the International Committee on Radio Broadcasting data that our stations operating in the 5-30 MHz range do not clog the air … It was their PR campaign.
The Chernobyl station, the radiating antenna of which was in Chernigov, was given to me as the chief designer, so that I could immediately prepare its modernization, the principles of further improvement. And in November 1986, in Chernobyl, the military was preparing to test the already modernized station.
But even before the modernization, we observed with its help launches from the western US missile range - Minuteman and Midgetman missiles.
In total, we tracked over a hundred missile launches.
Valery Alebastrov explains the scheme of the ZGRLS operation.
The probability of detecting a missile launch was 60%, this is a very high probability. The command post of the early warning system, where information from all three echelons flowed, was located in Solnechnogorsk. In the process of modernizing the Chernobyl station, we began to introduce algorithms that made it possible to register not only missiles, but also aircraft, all the way to Great Britain.
There were two cases that served to bring closer relations between the United States and the USSR even before the arrival of Gorbachev. The American system triggered a false alarm about a mass missile launch from the territory of the USSR. Their commander made a decision and did not give a signal to the command post, for which he was subsequently issued a personal pension. After that, we had a similar case, when both space and ground systems recorded a massive launch from the United States and our employee blocked the signal. The fact is that for satellites monitoring launches in the infrared range, cities, blast furnaces and other sources that can be weeded out are the source of false alarms. But there are also tropospheric glare of the sun at sunset and sunrise, which look like rocket torches and appear suddenly.
After these cases, our specialists and their specialists began to visit each other and cooperate. The modernization of the Chernobyl "Duga", which was completed by 1986, consisted in the introduction of new methods of signal processing.
As a participant and witness to the events of 1986, from the very beginning I was faced with the lies of journalists seeking sensations. On April 26, I was visiting a friend in Kiev, a colonel. On that day, he and his daughter went to the stadium, then the world bicycle race was taking place, and when we met with him at lunchtime, he said that the Voice of America had broadcast about the Chernobyl accident. In the evening I went to the station to buy a ticket to Nikolaev, where I lived then, and headed the NIIDAR branch. There were huge queues in front of the ticket offices, and at some point a woman in the uniform of a railway worker came out and hung up a notice: “Ticket offices 8, 9, 10 serve the residents of Pripyat”. And then people from Pripyat began to arrive. I noticed that among them were women with babies with bags.
At first they thought that people were going to practice or to have a rest in Artek, in Crimea. True, they noticed that one woman with a child in her arms was crying. I bought a ticket, I go out to the square, I see - my employee is walking from the radar station, where about a hundred people with their families lived.
He sways and says: “Don't you know? There was a serious accident, an explosion, and we were evacuated and told that it would be good to receive."
Buses were brought up for them, allowed to pack, taken out and resettled not only in Kiev, but also in the region. The lie consisted in the assertion that the evacuation from Pripyat took place only three or four days later, although in reality it began in the evening of April 26. Already in the first days, the entire road from Chernobyl to Kiev was packed with buses …
After the accident, all radar staff were evacuated. I flew to Moscow, and the question arose whether it was possible to send them on vacation, to which the Deputy Head of the Department of the Ministry of Defense Valery Bessmertny told me that this is for a long time, let the guys go. At the station there was a super-modern analog-digital signal processing system for that time, they began to decide how to transport the equipment to Komsomolsk-on-Amur. In August, the reactor was already covered with graphite and lead, and General Kuzikov and I flew to Chernobyl by helicopter to the site where these bags were still lying. The heat, we were dressed from underpants to socks in special clothes, respirators, shoe covers … we were with doctors, a radio operator.
Valentin Kuzikov refused to change his clothes, said: “There is such a situation that no one will accept us without my stripes. And I will call you the greatest Soviet nuclear physicist. Otherwise we will not solve anything."
General of the Army Pikalov assigned a dosimetrist, we got permission, and our equipment was taken out by trucks, trains and planes. It turned out to be clean, since it was in a room protected from a possible nuclear explosion. They brought it, mounted it in the Far East, after which Gorbachev's devastation began, which, as you know, begins not in the closets, but in the heads. The roof was leaking in the main building where the equipment was located. My employees hung polyethylene on expensive equipment, but the water ended up closing the control panel and a fire started. The nearest military unit also turned out to be a mess: the fire trucks had no water, and the object burned down due to the fact that 20 thousand rubles were not found. for roof repair. This ended the work of the second station.
Under an agreement with the Americans, an over-the-horizon station in Krasnoyarsk was blown up, the Ukrainians, having separated, blew up the station in Mukachevo and Nikolaev, the Balts in Skrunda, which worked in the third echelon.
In 1992, against the background of lack of money, the guys from NIIDAR, realizing that there were no alternatives, initiated work on a new station to control the European part of Russia with three nodes - in Mordovia, to control Europe, in Omsk, and in the Far East to control China. By then, the US had moved its missiles to submarines.
In 1996, I took the lead on the new station, everything was done on enthusiasm, and now we have one "Container" station in Mordovia in Kovylkino. But this station is understaffed, I wrote about this to President Putin, and, they say, recently, Defense Minister Shoigu ordered to urgently replenish the station and put it on alert.
The most terrible weapon now is hypersonic cruise missiles, which the United States is equipping its submarines with, removing ballistic missiles from them.
And today there is nothing better than the "Container" type stations against them.
The station can solve problems of detecting ballistic missiles at a distance of up to 6 thousand km, any aircraft up to the "Cessna", which landed on Red Square, up to 3.5 thousand km. Moreover, together with the Institute of Physics of the Earth, our station solved the problem of searching for earthquake precursors in Kamchatka in the ionosphere. Due to the arising electric voltage on the faults on the eve of the earthquake, irregularities and holes appear in the ionosphere.
The design of the "Container" is lighter: if the vibrators at the Chernobyl station each weighed 500 kg, then the vibrators of the modern station - 5-6 kg. If next to the Chernobyl station there was a whole town with infrastructure (kindergarten, school, hotel, houses for officers), then nothing of this is needed for the "Container"..
Pavel Kotlyar