Strategic Missile Force Base, Pervomaisk, Ukraine

Strategic Missile Base Pervomaisk ( - darkometer rating : 8 - ) UPDATE 24 February 2022: given the military invasion of Ukraine by Russia, this site will be out of foreign visitors' reach for the forseeable future. ------------------------------ The unique site of a former Cold-War -era ICBM silo and Launch Control Centre (LCC) of the Soviet Union , located in now independent Ukraine , in the countryside between Kyiv/Kiev and Odessa, near the small town of Pervomaisk (not the one in Donbas!). In addition to the original silo and LCC there's a plethora of related objects on open-air display as well as a dedicated small museum. But the highlight remains going down to the original underground LCC for the spectacle of a simulated launch. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: There's lots of conflicting information about this site so it is hard to come to an overview based on solid, reliable facts. From what I could gather, the silo and Launch Control Centre (LCC) formed part of the 46th division of the 43rd “Rocket Army” … the equivalent US terminology would be 46th Missile Squadron of the 43rd Strategic Missile Wing – cf. Minuteman missile base . Their physical layout was also similar, in that each LCC was responsible for 10 missiles each, placed in silos in a ring around the LCC some distance away and fired by remote control. The missile base apparently goes back to an older predecessor from the 1960s, but the silo, LCC and their related top-side facilities we see at the museum site today all date from the time the ICBM s in question were three-stage RS-22s/RT-23s, or SS-24 “Scalpel” missiles in NATO code, which were introduced in the late 1980s.