http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/ny...26shelter.html

March 26, 2006

Crackers Are Reminders of New York City's H-Bomb Fears

By SEWELL CHAN

"The discovery of a cache of cold war supplies inside the foundations of the
Brooklyn Bridge has prompted an outpouring of interest from some historians
and curators, but city officials are still at loss to explain how the
supplies got there and for whom they were intended.

Workers found the stockpile of water drums, medical supplies, gauze bandages
and bitter-tasting ration crackers in a cavernous masonry room under the
bridge's main entrance ramp in Lower Manhattan, while performing a regular
structural inspection on March 15.

Since news of the find became public last week, several city officials have
contacted the city's Department of Transportation, which maintains the
bridge.

Archivists from the Department of Records and Information Services want to
catalogue the supplies and move some of them into proper storage.

The Office of Emergency Management, successor to the civil defense agencies
that coordinated fallout shelters and air raid sirens, wants to display the
findings in the headquarters under construction in Downtown Brooklyn.

The Museum of the City of New York is interested in adding some of the
supplies to its collection of ephemera. "There's something so gripping about
the time-capsule nature of this," said Sarah M. Henry, the museum's deputy
director and chief curator. "People are curious and intrigued. That makes
for a great teachable moment."

The origins of the supplies remain a mystery, though many items carry labels
from the federal civil defense unit at the Pentagon. Several of the
cardboard boxes are stamped with the dates 1957 and 1962.

On Friday, two employees of the Transportation Department, with a reporter,
searched fruitlessly through 11 boxes of records from the city's Office of
Civil Defense to find references to the Brooklyn Bridge stockpile. The
search cast light on the anxious era when officials hoped to shelter their
populations to weather the apocalyptic effects of an atomic or hydrogen
bomb.

Amid fears of Axis sabotage, the city's Office of Civilian Defense was
created in 1941 under Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. By the 1950's, magazines
were trying to predict what would happen if, say, a 20-megaton bomb were
dropped on Manhattan.

"The descriptions of the impact of nuclear war were almost pornographic in
their lurid details," said Kenneth D. Rose, a historian at California State
University at Chico. "There was a fascination with the apocalyptic."

The city archives demonstrate that anxieties ratcheted upward between the
late 50's and the early 60's. Among the residents recruited to help with
drills and preparations was a young lawyer, Robert M. Morgenthau, who became
deputy coordinator of civil defense for the Bronx in 1954, according to a
newsletter in the files. (Mr. Morgenthau, 86, has been the Manhattan
district attorney since 1975.)

In 1956, city officials proposed digging up flower beds in the plaza in
front of the New York Public Library to build a "hydrogen age" bomb shelter
for up to 30 people. "I disagree emphatically with your suggestion," Robert
Moses, the parks commissioner, wrote to Robert E. Condon, the director of
civil defense. "In fact I will not agree to the construction of such a
shelter in any park area in New York City."

The era also marked the beginnings of a peace movement that would gain force
during the Vietnam War.

"All civil defense can do is to frighten children and fool the public into
thinking there is protection against an H-Bomb," declared a flier calling
for a Civil Defense Protest Day on May 3, 1960, in City Hall Park. "The time
has come not for civil defense drills but for unceasing demands for
world-wide disarmament."

After the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, city preparations for nuclear war
intensified, bolstered by federal money. The Waldorf-Astoria became the
first hotel in the city to be stockpiled with fallout-shelter supplies,
according to a 1963 city press release. An Emergency Mass Feeding Manual
from 1964 mentioned the city's recommendation that survivors of a possible
attack supplement "specially prepared wheat biscuits" with citrus juices,
peanut butter and jelly.

"This is absurd, and people finally realized that it was," said Allan M.
Winkler, a historian at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, who has written
extensively on cold war anxieties. "Maybe the crackers would be good, maybe
not. If a bomb went off, all hell was going to break loose and those kinds
of palliative efforts weren't going to make much of a difference."

Paul S. Boyer, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said
the Brooklyn Bridge hoard should not be interpreted only as a sign of
naïveté. "Throughout this period, there was an enormous level of skepticism
about this civil defense strategy of fallout shelters and stockpiling," he
said.

The cold war fears were overtaken in the late 60's and early 70's by
Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis, while relations between the United
States and the Soviet Union stabilized.

By then, 230,000 buildings had been designated as fallout shelters in the
metropolitan area, according to news reports. In 1979, the city, after
unsuccessful efforts to give away the stale foodstuffs, was paying
contractors $38 a ton to cart away fallout supplies from some of the 10,800
buildings across the city where they still lay.

An estimated 350,000 of those crackers, in shiny, watertight canisters,
escaped destruction. They are still inside the Brooklyn Bridge, waiting for
officials to decide their fate.

Iris Weinshall, the transportation commissioner, took some of the crackers
found in the bridge to City Hall and presented them to Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg.

"I asked her whether she wanted me to eat one, she said no, she had acted as
the guinea pig and had been willing to sacrifice her palate for the city,"
he said "One mouthful and she spit it out, was my understanding."

Ms. Weinshall, in an interview, politely corrected the mayor. She took two
bites and ingested the first, but "could not fathom swallowing" the second.

"It tasted like cardboard, but with a nasty backbite that stayed in your
mouth for hours," she said. "I cannot think of eating a saltine now without
that taste coming up."

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