Serpukhov-15

node · earth · Moscow Oblast

The closed military settlement and command centre south of Moscow that housed the control station for the Oko early-warning satellite constellation, and the place where the false alarm of 26 September 1983 was received and judged. It is included here as a deliberate example of a record whose geography this pack cannot supply: the facility was a closed installation whose position is not established in any source consulted for this pack, so no coordinate is offered rather than a plausible one derived from the name of a nearby town. What can be said is functional. The centre received satellite reports, correlated them with ground-based radar coverage, and passed assessments up a chain that had minutes rather than hours to work with — an architecture in which the human judgement of a single duty officer was one of very few checks between a sensor reading and a decision.