Two of the dates stamped on many of the boxes—1957 and 1962—hold particular significance. In 1957 the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite. 1962 was the year of the Cuban missile crisis.
"Here we have this wonderful cache of information," New York's transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall, told reporters on a tour of the room on Tuesday. "This is modern American history."
City officials have moved to secure the site until they decide what to do with the find.
Ghost Chamber
Nicholas Cull is a Cold War historian at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. To him, the Brooklyn Bridge stash "is like a ghost in a Shakespeare play—reminding us of just how bleak things were in the era of Sputnik and the Cuban missile crisis."
The 1950s were a time of unprecedented prosperity in the United States, as well as unprecedented anxiety. Fear of nuclear attack caused many Americans to build their own fallout shelters.
How many private shelters were built is not known.
Most Americans who built bunkers in their backyards did so in secret. But Rose, the historian, estimates that there may have been 200,000 shelters created.
There was never a federal program to build fallout shelters. But state and local governments all over the country in the 1950s appointed civil-defense coordinators in charge of creating and maintaining shelters.
"No public shelters were built per se," Rose said. "What they did was try to find places—basements in schools, typically—where the public could take shelter."
Several of the boxes in the Brooklyn Bridge chamber have labels from the Office of Civil Defense. The Pentagon unit was created in the early 1960s with the mission of preparing for a nuclear attack.
Misplaced Nostalgia
Over the last several decades the supplies from most shelters have been discarded, donated, or sold off. Many backyard bunkers have been turned into wine or fruit cellars.
"The surprising thing about the Brooklyn Bridge shelter is that so much of it is intact," Rose said.
"In almost every other place this stuff has been thrown away a long time ago."
In truth the fallout shelters probably would have done little to actually protect people from a nuclear attack.
"Even the best fallout shelters were only designed to keep out radioactive fallout, not to resist a nuclear blast or firestorm that might have been created by nuclear weapons," Rose said. "They were mostly just basements."
"Protecting the citizens of New York City from nuclear attack was recognized by pretty much everyone as a hopeless task," he added.
In 1959 a federal report concluded that two hydrogen bombs dropped near the Brooklyn Bridge would kill at least 6.1 million people, the New York Times reported.
"Now that the Cold War is over there's a tendency to look back at it with some nostalgia," Rose said.
"I hope that this [discovery] will be a corrective for that, because there is nothing very pleasant about this era."
"When we are talking about the confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, we're talking not about one nuclear weapon going off—we're talking about tens of thousands going off at the same time," he said.
Cull, the USC historian, says the Brooklyn Bridge stockpile illustrates the difference in threats during the Cold War era compared to today, when the main danger to U.S. citizens appears to come from terrorist attacks.
"Looking back, when the USSR was the enemy there was some comfort to be derived from imagining the mirror image state with its mirror image concerns," Cull said.
"Al Qaeda is a very different proposition."
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