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This weekend I received a disturbing phone call from Russia.
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"I was just in nuclear bunker 18 stories below Moscow," said a man on the line.
"I turned a key, pressed a button, and launched a nuclear strike on New York City. The missiles will hit you any minute."
The man was actually just a relative with a twisted sense of humor, and he was joking — sort of.
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He'd just finished a tour of a Cold War museum called "Bunker-42," which included a simulation of a nuclear strike targeting cities in the United States.
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Although his attack was a ruse, the Russian nuclear bunker, its equipment, and Cold War history are indeed real.
Here's what it's like inside the Tagansky Protected Command Point: a top-secret Soviet facility designed to survive thermonuclear war that is now a thriving family attraction.
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There is very unusual Cold War museum near the center of Moscow.
Blink and you'll miss it, though.
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The entrance looks like a basic military checkpoint.
Up to 3,000 people could survive in the facility for 90 days, though it functioned primarily "as a communications headquarters for the country's leadership and military top brass."
It was called the Tagansky Protected Command Point, since it connected to the Tagansky station on Moscow's Metro. Workers commuted in and out at night by subway train.
"Everything more or less valuable or interesting was [gone] and we got the site in an horrific, neglected state," the company's director told the Moscow Times in 2007.
A photo posted by Anastasia Borisova (@an_borisova) on Aug 20, 2015 at 11:15am PDT
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"Just inside the blast doors was a decontamination area," he said. "Soldiers could be decontaminated and given new clothes before entering the stairwell."
A photo posted by Anastasia (@anastasia_pushkareva) on Nov 3, 2015 at 1:10pm PST
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"During the tour, they show you a film about the nuclear arms race during the Cold War," my relative told me. "It's slightly nationalistic, depicting the atomic bomb drops in Japan as shows of force instead of a way to end the war with minimal casualties."
A video posted by Шиганова Дарья (@sladkiysirnik) on Nov 10, 2015 at 8:15am PST
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The film also paints former Soviet leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin as traitors for "agreeing to American demands" that Russia dismantle many of its nukes and bunkers in the 1990s.
A photo posted by Anastasia Aleeva-Szakal (@bread_and_games) on Sep 1, 2015 at 10:57am PDT
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Your tour group takes control of a nuclear launch console. You target a US city, turn two keys simultaneously to arm an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), then press a button to "launch" it.
A photo posted by Victor Rybkin (@victorybki) on Aug 20, 2015 at 11:40am PDT
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Immediately afterward, a projector plays clips from "The Sum of all Fears" on the wall. The the in-character tour guide "thanked me for my service 'to our socialist republic'" for pressing the launch button, he says.