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Check this out, I've made an overlay out of one of the FAS images. It matches the site perfectly, so these should definitely be the GORGON facilities.



Yup, that's the one I was referring to. It does seem very likely that these are the GORGON sites.

There are a couple of loose ends, however. I've managed to find all of the locations of the satellite photos shown on the FAS site, and, although all are near Moscow, most of the other ones are not very close to the presumed locations of Moscow ABM facilities. I've become very skeptical that those places are in fact part of the system. One of them I suspect (although it is little more than a guess) is Serpukhov-15. So here's the question: if most of the photos have nothing to do with ABMs, can we be sure that the photo of our GORGON site is really a photo of an ABM facility? I'm still pretty sure that these are the GORGON sites, but in the absence of firmer evidence about the subject of the overlay I wouldn't take its existence to be conclusive evidence of the identity of the site.

Second, there is the GALOSH question. The fact that the presumed GORGON sites are visible in GE imagery with few or no major changes strongly suggests that the sites do host GORGON. However, assuming (possibly incorrectly) that the FAS image is a declassified recce satellite photo, it must have been taken in the late 1970s at the latest. That might allow for GORGON, but it's more consistent with GALOSH. I've also had a look at earlier declassified imagery of that site. What I was able to access was very low resolution, but it is possible to say that something had been built on that site by 1966 (or earlier). That, of course, would also suggest GALOSH.

These apparently contradictory indications are not necessarily a problem. It is likely that the GORGON, being a modification of GALOSH, was installed in former GALOSH sites. However, it is reasonably reliably reported that GALOSH was deployed in four sets of pairs of launch locations, for a total of eight sites, with pairs separated by 4-7 km. I don't see any residual evidence of this deployment pattern around the "GORGON sites". Of course, I may have missed it, or the other GALOSH sites may have been removed or built over so thoroughly that it is no longer possible to recognize them. The latter possibility is plausible since it would conceivably have been a violation of the ABM Treaty to leave the sites in a functional state once GORGON was deployed. Alternatively, the information about the original deployment locations may be incorrect. (There seems to be as much contradictory information available about the GALOSH/GORGON deployments as there is about the GAZELLE deployments.) I'd be happier if it could all be wrapped up in a neat, tidy picture, however.

On the question of the (apparent) excess northeast GORGON site, you may well be right that two sites were built in that area and the public understanding that there is only one is simply erroneous. If so, it messes up the claim that there are four GORGON sites with eight launchers each for a total of 32 missiles. But we already know from the GAZELLE sites that the Russians are not adverse to deploying different numbers of launchers at their ABM sites (12 at some, 16 at others in the case of GAZELLE), so maybe that's a non-issue. We may just have to wait for higher res imagery to sort this one out.



We want high res!