Russian Thieves Break Into Missile Silo to Find it Filled With Money
A team of thieves that broke into an abandoned missile silo not far from the Russian city of Kostroma in search of nonferrous metals was shocked to find the shaft packed with Soviet money bills, Regnum news agency reported on Tuesday.
The incident would have remained secret, had the wind not blown hundreds of banknotes all over the countryside.
Four men from Nizhny Novgorod found the silo that had had missiles dismantled and put on maintenance decades ago in accordance with the Soviet disarmament program. They targeted the metals inside and said they had had no idea about the money hidden in the shaft.
It's the wind-blown money that elevates this from mere Madmaxian doomedness to screwball comedy. Is this what Schneier means by "movie plot threats"?
After careful counting, the Russian Federation Bank announced that the total amount of stored cash weighed approximately 9.2 tons and was valued at 7.3 billion rubles, or $9.43 USD.
Okay it wasn't part of the article, but it should have been.
the picture made me think it was going to be about that sidewalk chalk artist.
Oddly, I had the same experience.
I did too!
I am looking forward to watching the Russian adaptation of this story that will somehow resemble It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Unfortunately, Johnathan Winters is unavailable.
The photo is not of a silo, but a balistic missile launch tube on a submarine.
yeah, my thoughts exactly. Unless the russians somehow just dropped some submarines around instead of building silos.
Just because I never ever take the anorak off, that's not a silo, it's a Delta submarine. Kostroma housed SS-24 missiles, which are about 2.5m diameter. The launch tube here is about 2m.
All of the modern SS-24s are rail-mobile, and any SS-24 silo should have been eliminated in the last five years or so under START (which is not to say they all have been - START's full of exceptions). It's also possible that the silo was for an SS-17, which is more aptly described as "dismantled and put on maintenance [ten years] ago". Either way, that's a long-empty silo, and there's no "threat" here -- the reason it wasn't defended is because it was harmless.
Good catch, oaky.
I guess I should have realised that following the Schnier link was going to lead me straight into a wall of commenter stupidity, but jebus...
I never wound have suspected that the USSR was going to try and wipe us out by smothering us in long-range balistic money.
I love the fact that it mentions how the perps will be punished, but makes no mention of investigations into why there was a missile silo full of money, or who was behind hiding the money.
also, Dear Russian People, please stop exploting your granfather's sexuality...
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Russians bring tragedy to levels western culture simply cannot grasp.