Cold War "Time Capsule" Found in Brooklyn Bridge

Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News

March 24, 2006

For decades it waited for a bomb that never dropped.

In a dank and dingy vault underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, a routine structural inspection last week unearthed a veritable Cold War time capsule, city officials announced this week.

The New York City bunker is stockpiled with decades-old provisions that were meant to be used after a nuclear attack.

City inspectors were astonished to find water containers, medical supplies, and hundreds of thousands of calorie-packed crackers.

Countless bomb shelters were built across the U.S. during the Cold War's tense nuclear showdowns. But most have long since been cleared out.

This cache of survival supplies was simply forgotten. It is unclear whether the site was intended as a fallout shelter or simply as a storage place for emergency provisions.

"This is a very grim reminder of a stark era in American history when people were worried not just about another war but about the extinction of life on the planet," said Kenneth Rose, a history professor at California State University in Chico. Rose is the author of One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture.

(See our interactive cross section of New York City.)

Historic Cookies

It's safe to assume that none of the 150,000 people who cross the landmark bridge every day had any idea that it harbored a secret chamber.

The room was discovered last week near the East River shoreline of Manhattan's Lower East Side. It is sequestered inside one of the arched masonry structures under the bridge's main entrance ramp.

Up two flights of stairs city workers found boxes of blankets marked "For Use Only After Enemy Attack." They also came across cookies—an estimated 352,000 of them—sealed in tin cans labeled "Civil Defense All Purpose Survival Crackers."

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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