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0 pointsJdeBP9mo ago0 comments

In hindsight, that does seem a little ridiculous; yet it was indeed the thinking. One could see where the exchanges were by simple dint of visiting a place. Soviet spies would just have had to walk around a bit.

Of course, nuclear weapons wouldn't even have had to specifically target exchanges in order to disrupt electronic communications as they already were by the 1980s.

It was amusing to learn a decade ago that the U.S.S.R. military had far more complete maps of many parts of the U.K. than Ordnance Survey published. Apparently down to Soviet spies just walking around a bit, playing tourist.

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ajb9mo ago

U.S.S.R. military had far more complete maps of many parts of the U.K. than Ordnance Survey published.

Although amusing, note that its than the Ordnance Survey published. I.E. they had the data, it was just classified. Also, it's fairly clear that the Soviet maps were mostly derived from OS maps. Looking at my street, for example, they have it in a pre-WWII configuration which they could only have got by starting from a rather old OS map. So they clearly only checked for differences in areas they thought important, such as government or military areas - they didn't have people mapping the whole UK. Still it's probably true that one can get more information about certain areas in these Soviet maps than in extant OS maps.

qingcharles9mo ago

I looked up the local telephone exchange on this site for the town where I grew up. It's a big building. I went past it thousands of times and never knew what it was. It can't have been auspiciously labeled in any way or I would have poked around as a curious geeky kid.

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