Cold War bunker found in Brooklyn Bridge

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/21/coldwar.trove/index.html

New York workers have discovered a trove of Cold War-era supplies within the masonry of the Brooklyn Bridge, a cache meant to aid in survival efforts in the event of nuclear attack.

City Department of Transportation employees were conducting maintenance on the structure Wednesday when they found the cache on the top floor of a three-floor space inside the bridge's base, agency spokeswoman Kay Salin said.

Some containers were marked with two dates notorious in the annals of the Cold War: 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space, and 1962, the year of the Cuban missile crisis when the two superpowers may have come closest to war.

Salin said one of the containers was marked, "To be opened after attack by the enemy."

The stockpile included empty water drums and boxes of medical supplies, such as tourniquet bandages and an intravenous drip. Also, there were cans of high-calorie crackers with instructions to consume 10,000 calories a day per person. The instructions said the crackers should be destroyed after 10 years, but they were mostly intact.

[Beetwasher]

1. Damn! The Fuckers Found MY STASH!!!!

BASTARDS!

[NoAmericanTaliban]

2. Maybe that is where Cheney was holed up...Ducking & Covering

[tridim]

3. 10,000 calories a day? That's nuts..

I guess it was the 1950's.. "Be sure to butter your crackers or dip them in nutritious pork gravy before consuming", Oh, "and have a refreshing smoke afterwords to alleviate side-effects from nuclear fallout"

[SoCalDem]

4. Did they also find the tasty lard dip

:)

[tridim]

6. Mmmmm.. Tasty lard dip..

[danalytical]

5. I ate some of those crackers

I used to be in this band. We were recording an album in a building used as apartments for artists. The recording engineer brought us down to the basement once to show us an old bomb shelter. We found boxes and boxes of these huge tin cans filled with those big crackers. We took a cople tins back with us to our band practice space/ party space. After a couple dares we all ate a couple bites. It tasted like sawdust, and just fell apart to the touch. But over the course of the next few months those crackers all disappeared from our hang out spot. They were nasty, but I guess some of the drunk penniless partiers needed something to eat after all those beers. I think there are a few boxes left at the bomb shelter though. Next time I go there I'll have to go see. I have a friend that has an apartment in that building now.

[Frank Cannon]

9. Oh, I've had some of them too

I don't know where he got them, but a friend of mine in high school had a stash of CD food goodies in his basement that were at least 20 years old (his dad did work for the city and probably got them from a demolition project somewhere). He assured me that these things were designed to last something like 50 years and that they were okay to eat. Well, for reasons I won't go into, we were starved, so we decided to dig in.

The meal I had featured one of these wonderful crackers. You know those "buttery" Club crackers? Well, magnify the butter/oil/grease content by about 20, and you have one of these. It actually wasn't half bad, considering how old it was.

[Up2Late]

11. "Beers" RIGHT! "Beers..."

I've been that "drunk" before...:hippie:

[danalytical]

16. LOL

I know I didn't finish em off, whoever did might have been "drunk" as well as drunk. I would've ordered a pizza. Mmm East Side Pizza in New Britain CT. The best greek pizza on earth.

[central scrutinizer]

21. They were called Nebraskits

I grew up in rural Nebraska during the arms race and we had mock drills where we had to eat them, too.

http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0900/stories/0901_0130.html

"By 1964, the Lincoln metropolitan area had public shelters for 100,000 people. If they survived the first blast and wave of radiation, people could survive in fallout shelters for weeks on the food, water, and supplies that were kept in shelters. In Nebraska, the Department of Agriculture created the "Nebraskit" a compressed biscuit made from wheat, corn or milo. Milk bars were also made from dairy products. Each of the Nebraskits were designed to satisfy a person's food needs during a stay in a fallout shelter. According to an enthusiastic state newsletter from the time, "The rations have a long shelf life, are ready to eat and are palatable to all age groups." Other varieties were produced later. Cartons of Nebraskits were stored in fallout shelters throughout the United States."

[pitohui]

24. oh man i haven't seen those crackers in maybe 30 yrs

and even then i wouldn't have dreamed of sampling them

you are a brave person

[BiggJawn]

19. They ate good back then.

Worked it all off, too. I tell my dietician all the time that she could have been tried at Nuremburgh for the 2,000 calorie diet she has me on...

Oh, wow! The CD museum website says it was 10,000 calories for a 2 WEEK stay. That's about 700 a day! Of course, you're just sitting in the dark, waiting for either Soviet soldiers or Atomic Mutants...

The "Carbohydrate Supplement" was pretty good, 20# cans of orange and lemon drops. The ones I had were 15 years old.

[zoeb]

7. What? No duct tape and plastic sheeting....

Boy, were they in need of an Ashcroft in the '50's.

[brooklynite]

8. I got to visit the Manhattan shelter back in the mid 80's...

...when I was doing an internship for the Civil Defense office. The communications setup was worthy of a 1950's B-grade movie and I was able to pick up an emergency water bottle (bottled 1960) and a clip-on radiation dosimeter.

[Up2Late]

10. Reminds me of "Dr. Strangelove..." Here's more from the kit...

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/quotes>

Major T. J. "King" Kong (Slim Pickens):

"Survival kit contents check. In them you'll find: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings. Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff." :evilgrin:

[CrazyOrangeCat]

13. !!!

:rofl:

[Kingshakabobo]

26. Little trivia for you:

"pretty good weekend in Vegas" was supposed to be "pretty good weekend in Dallas."

They edited/dubbed it due to the JFK assassination. :hi:

<more useless info from my brain>

[benddem]

12. Well shows you how backward they were then

no tuna fish cans and powdered milk under the bed.
:sarcasm:

[Redstone]

14. Anyone know where there are more pictures? This is fascinating.

Redstone

[Up2Late]

18. Here's a link to the "Cold War Civil Defense Museum," You might find...

...what you are looking for there: <http://www.civildefensemuseum.com/cdmuseum2/supply/radkits.html>

[DUHandle]

15. Now, everybody sing.....

http://www.conelrad.com/media/atomicmusic/sh_boom.html

[Buns_of_Fire]

17. They shoulda called Geraldo

After "Al Capone's Vault," this sounds right up his alley.

[BikeWriter]

20. Flashbacks to Alaska 1969. No supply planes for months...

We opened a cache of emergency rations stored for ~twenty years. The major wouldn't allow anyone to try them. :yuk:

[smitty]

22. It says a lot about bridge maintenance when a large storage

room remains unopened and un-inspected for 40+ years.

[The_Casual_Observer]

23. Those cracker boxes were green painted metal with a little stenciled

"Sunshine Baker" man figure in yellow, as I recall.

[yellowcanine]

25. Seems like that might be 1,000 calories a day. That would be enough

to survive on if one did not move around very much and would stretch the supplies. 10,000 calories is nuts. The only people who need those kind of calories are competitive rowers.

[NYC]

27. 10,000 calories for 14 days.

That's not much food. You got 125 calories about 6 times a day.

Yummy:

[yellowcanine]

28. OK that sounds about right for 14 days. You won't get fat on that, that's

for sure. The bulghur wafers look tasty. Is there any lard to spread on them?

[NYC]

31. I think the lard has been baked into them.

Honestly. Someone who ate one described it as greasy.

Your whole meal was contained in the cracker. Yummy. However, there was a carbohydrate supplement which looked like hard candy. I saw 4 kinds. One set of square ones had blue (?) and white. The other set was oblong shaped, and came in red and yellow. The red dye used in that carbohydrate supplement was later determined to be a carcinogen, and has since been outlawed.

Yummy again.

I guess if you're going to be sitting in the base of a bridge for 10 days, you can't fuss too much about the food. At least it was nutrition (and carcinogens).

In addition to the 6 crackers a day (and I don't know if you got the carbohydrate supplement daily) you received one quart of water.

Haute cuisine.

[saigon68]

30. Bulgur Wafers

Wheat

[petronius]

29. This was my favorite part of the article:

"It's hard to believe that the space was meant to be a fallout shelter, because it is not underground and light and air does get inside it," she said. "Could it have been a bunker for the mayor?"

All politicians should get elevated, unsealed fallout shelters... :rofl: