"Cartwheel" Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.
All the now-declassified pixels at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768
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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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The upper white section of the tower is actually a plexiglass radome, concealing various microwave and UHF radio antennas.
CARTWHEEL and its cousins were decommissioned around 1990. Most of the towers, mainly atop mountains in remote areas, were demolished or left to rot. However, CARTWHEEL and CORKSCREW (on a mountain near the Appalachian trail in central Maryland) have been maintained in good condition, now repurposed by the FAA.
Despite CARTWHEEL being located in the middle of a residential neighborhood in a busy city and staffed by military personnel, officials went to great lengths to conceal the true purpose of these towers. They hid in plain sight, appearing to be silos or water towers (they even used civilian water trucks to send crews to some of the towers).
It was only after the cold war ended that the details of the network were declassified.
Obsolete secret infrastructure like CARTWHEEL tower, only revealed decades later, intrigues me not just for its scale and design, but also for the obvious question it gives rise to. If this stuff effectively managed to stay unnoticed for decades, what newer secrets are hiding under our noses today?
@[email protected] I used to live in a small town called Griesheim in Germany and would regularly drive past an abandoned US airbase. The gate was still manned and I'd occasionally see people in cars getting checked there. Thought it was a bit weird, but that was it.
A couple of years later the Snowden revelations came out and it turns out it housed the infamous underground Dagger Complex (there were radomes too, but I never really gave it much thought).