A closer look
Touring a facility designed to initiate global thermonuclear annihilation is definitely an eccentric way to spend an afternoon in Moscow. Hidden completely out of sight beneath a fake neoclassical building in the Tagansky District, Bunker-42 was the Soviet Union's premier top-secret command center during the Cold War. Plunging 18 stories underground, it was built specifically to survive a direct nuclear strike from the United States. Today, visitors take a high-speed elevator down to the grim, steel-plated tunnels to play with deactivated communication consoles and marvel at the bleak architectural lengths humanity will go to in the name of mutually assured destruction.
