You know the scene at the end of The Incredibles—and the start of The Incredibles 2—that has the troglodyte supervillian the bursting out from underground in a colossal drilling machine? Well, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was actually developing just such a digging machine, a brutal, nuclear-powered beast called the . At least, it seems like they did.

The Battle Mole was a type of vehicle known as a —essentially, the land version of a submarine. If you’ve ever tried to dive into your backyard the same way you’d dive into a pool, you know empirically that the process of traveling through the Earth’s crust is far more difficult than traveling through water, which is largely why subterrenes aren’t very common.

Tunnel boring machines are related to subterrenes, but are different in that they’re tools for digging tunnels, not vehicles designed to transport people and cargo by digging tunnels. These sorts of machines had been imagined in science fiction literature for years, notably in Russian author which was hilariously machine

Real-world development of such machines was happening in the 1920s and 1930s in a variety of countries, including Germany, Russia/the Soviet Union, and the United States, but I want to focus on Soviet developments, since there’s the most evidence there that they resulted in the creation of an actual vehicle.

In the 1930s, Soviet inventor A. that was, at least in part, developed by studying X-rays of a mole. I’m having trouble determining the actual size of this machine, and if it was remotely controlled or piloted.

Some s but the one picture I found of it lacks a good reference for scale; is it a small device, a few feet long, as it could appear to be, or is this image of a much larger machine, an actual vehicle? A cutaway drawing in an , and another guy just standing around inside! Perhaps this was an actual, crewed vehicle.

While Trebelev’s machine was capable of traveling through solid ground and making tunnels, it was realized that the best way to accomplish this task was with the use of extreme heat on the digging end of the subterrene. Generating enough energy capable of producing such heat was highly difficult until the advent of nuclear power.

By 1964, using a nuclear reactor similar to the type used for nuclear submarines, the Soviet Union allegedly , likely the first fully-realized solid-Earth boring military vehicle.

The goals of the Battle Mole were secret, but some sources suggest that Soviet leader as a way to attack and destroy American underground military facilities, communications infrastructure, and installations like underground missile silos.

I do love some of the machine-translated , which can be pretty dramatic:

“Maybe the extravagant Khrushchev dreamed that the time would come and the steel Soviet fist would crawl out of the ground right on the lawn at the White House in Washington? That will be a mother’s mother!”

Yeah, that would be a mother’s mother.

Allegedly, the Battle Mole was . It held a crew of five and around one ton of cargo, which would likely be explosives and/or other weapons. Using its reactor to melt material in front of it as it drilled and flow that material behind it, the Battle Mole could dig through solid rock at speeds between about 4 to 8 MPH.

That’s pretty damn fast for going through solid rock.

There’s a cutaway drawing and some speculative renderings of what the Battle Mole may have looked like, but I’ll admit I’m pretty skeptical about the accuracy of these.

One of the most alarming missions planned for the Battle Mole was , where it would areas to plant nuclear charges that could be detonated to cause earthquakes, tsunamis, and other wildly destructive events.

Tests of the Battle Mole in the Ural mountains seem to have been successful, with the Mole said to have gone through rock like “ and it was able to destroy a test underground bunker successfully.

Things eventually went quite badly for the Battle Mole, with , killing everyone on board and bringing the project to a halt. As the

“However, during the next tests in 1964, a car that penetrated the Ural Mountains near Nizhny Tagil for a distance of 10 km, for unknown reasons, exploded. Since the explosion was nuclear, the apparatus with the people in it simply evaporated, and the broken tunnel collapsed. In the press was the name of the deceased commander of the “Battle Mole” - Colonel Semyon Budnikov. But official confirmation of this never sounded. The project was closed, all documentary evidence of it was liquidated, as if nothing had happened.”

Now, I’ll be honest with you here—I’m not sure how much I trust a lot of these sources. I do think there were certainly experiments conducted, and I think Trebelev’s machine existed, but I’m not entirely convinced about the conveniently destroyed Battle Mole. Part of my skepticism comes from passages like this,

“Or maybe another civilization exists literally under our feet? And the guards did not want the Soviet “mole” to penetrate the forbidden limits. After all, the technical characteristics allowed the “Battle Mole” to reach the center of the Earth. Therefore, a unique underground machine was destroyed. And the mystery of the long-standing Soviet project is unlikely to ever be fully revealed.”

Yeeeeah.

Now, if we at least accept that significant R&D was expended in the development of such subterrenes, which seems reasonable, then that brings up some interesting questions. Questions like was Russian military expert Viktor Baranetz serious

In March of 2017, Baranetz told the Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda this:

“And we are quietly ‘seeding’ the U.S. shoreline with nuclear ‘mole’ missiles (they dig themselves in and ‘sleep’ until they are given the command)[...]”

Kremiln spokeserson Dmitry Peskov suggested that the newspaper wasn’t a reliable source, and dismissed Baranetz’ claims. Still, isn’t that exactly what they’d do and say if the decedents of the Battle Mole were real?

Did anyone feel a rumbling just now?