Тукумский аэродром

Each story starts somewhere. This one started with someone who, for a bit of cash, promised to disclose some very secret information. To wit, he said that he knew that the warhead of a nuclear missile is buried at the Tukums airfield. That, he added, was a “present” from the Russian special services when the Russian military left the airfield in the 1990s. The man claimed to have taken a radiation measurement device to the endangered location, saying that the indicators were unambiguous – there was an increased level of radiation there. What, he asks, will happen when the warhead starts to break down?
The man did not want to disclose his name. Let’s call him Sunny. He has a bemused little smile that might seem to be friendly to anyone ... well, anyone except for Sunny’s father. He told us to keep the man away from him – he could no longer tolerate his son, who, he said, was a drunkard.
Sunny wasn’t very clear in his claims, but he did say that at one time he worked as a technician at the airfield. He said that there was a division of the “deaf and dumb” there – the secret service, which did not tell anyone what it was doing at the airfield. Conversations with those men were strictly prohibited. Then came the early 1990s, when the Soviet military left the airfield. Sunny was in a restaurant when he got into a conversation with a high-ranking officer who proudly told him that a little “present” had been left behind for the Latvians – a nuclear warhead buried at a depth of 30 metres. After 12 years, the packaging around the warhead will be gone, and then Latvians will get a huge burst of radiation.
Sunny says that his conscience would not allow him to keep quiet about this extraordinary statement, and so he gave the information to our newspaper. Radiation levels, of course, are easy to check, and so we went to see a friend of his who had a dosimeter. He lent it to us. Off we went to the airfield. We stopped at the gate which used to lead to the airfield’s garages. According to Sunny, that is not far from the place where the bomb was buried. He wouldn’t say exactly where it was buried, because along with the warhead, the Russians buried 150 grams of molybdenum that is worth 28,000 euros per gram on the black market. That, said Sunny, was his secret means for becoming a millionaire. The dosimeter showed nothing out of the ordinary, and Sunny started to tell us that we had to go exactly to where the bomb was buried – 300 metres to the North of the gate. OK. We walked all over the territory as if we were spies, and once again the dosimeter was silent. There wasn’t too much land there. At one far corner, there were two underground storage facilities, numbered No. 5 and No. 4. It appeared to us that vegetables had been stored there at one time. A bit to the West was an impressive bunker with two hangars, now surrounded by trees. At the corners of the bunker, importantly enough, there were machine gun nests – similar to ones which I saw at a former Soviet missile base in Germany where nuclear weapons really were kept. In other words, there had been something important here, but we just could not find any place where someone might have buried a deadly cargo at a depth of 30 metres.

Legends and truth

Sunny said that the bomb was in a lead container that was five centimetres thick. Even if we assume that the whole package weighed only 52 kilograms, as has been claimed by a few unofficial sources, the fact is that it is by no means easy to dig a shaft that is 30 metres deep. That is not something that you would call an ordinary hole.
Evidence given by people in Tukums is ambiguous. There are those who say that the Russian military didn’t have any such equipment in the 1990s – it leased major equipment and went to far as to borrow a lawnmower from a local gardening shop. There are others, however, who swear up and down that no one can know what exactly was going on at the airfield or what the Soviet military did there. There are living legends about underground tunnels. A former guard at the airfield from the era when the Durbe agricultural company had taken it over told me that at the end of the runway which is closer to Jauntukums, there was a sign reading “Do not leave the runway.” No such sign was anywhere else on the airfield, he said, adding that the story was that there was an underground tunnel next to the runway. Enthusiasts brought in their equipment and did find empty space underneath the surface, our source told us. True, there is no proof of what he said. When we talked to the acquaintance of Sunny who had the dosimeter, I might add, he denied that there was ever any excess radiation at the airfield. The man said that at one time there were two metal boxes with radon in them at the airfield, and the radiation level was six times higher than normal at that time. While thought was given to what to do with the boxes, local Gypsies carted them away as scrap metal. The friend said that the Gypsies were probably walking around and shining, if they could walk at all.
That’s the story. No one at any government institution has any plans to check it out.