Posted on 03/21/2006 12:38:10 PM PST by neverdem
For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.
City workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers — an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.
To step inside the vault — a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes — is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.
Several historians said yesterday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
"Civil defense agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950's and stocking them with supplies of food and water and whatnot," said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale and a pre-eminent scholar of the cold war.
"Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago. It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact — one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The Department of Transportation, which controls the...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
And the larger medical kits contained a pharmacy sized bottle of phenobarbital, a very popular "downer" from the '60s.
Regards,
GtG
They must not have distributed those at my school, I only remember the crackers ;>).
Headline: Brooklyn Bridge Houses '50s Survival Stash
From Story:
[...]
Many of the cardboard boxes discovered last week in the bridge vault were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in cold-war history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
Some boxes bear labels from the Office of Civil Defense, a unit of the Pentagon that coordinated domestic preparedness in the early 1960's.
BTW, note how the Cuban missile crisis only seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.
The provisions were probably comforting but would likely have been useless in the case of a nuclear attack, said Graham Allison, a former assistant secretary of defense who teaches at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
No comment.
Good reading
Good catch! What did they know and when did they know it?!!
What did they know and when did they know it?!!
LOL!
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