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March 2-6, 2006 Crackers Are Pointers of Ny City's H-Bomb Fears By SEWELL CHAN The finding of a of cold war supplies within the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge has caused an outpouring of attention from some curators and historians, but town authorities continue to be at loss to describe the way the supplies got there and for whom these were meant. Employees discovered the stockpile of water drums, medical materials, gauze bandages and bitter-tasting ration cookies in a cavernous masonry space underneath the bridge's main entry slam in Lower Manhattan, while doing a normal architectural examination on March 15. Because information of the find turned public a week ago, a few city officials have approached the city's Department of Transportation, which keeps the link. Archivists in the Department of Information and Records Ser-vices wish to catalogue the materials and go a number of them into appropriate storage. Work of Emergency Management, heir for the civil defense organizations that air raid sirens and matched fall-out shelters, really wants to show the results in the headquarters under development in Downtown Brooklyn. The Museum of the Town of New York is thinking about introducing some of the materials to its assortment of ephemera. So gripping concerning the character of this," said Sarah M "there is some thing. Carol, the museum's deputy director and chief curator. "People are fascinated and interested. Which makes for an excellent teachable moment." The roots of the materials remain a secret, although labels are carried by many items from the national civil defense system in the Pentagon. A number of the cardboard boxes are placed using the times 1957 and 1962. On Friday, two workers of the Transportation Department, having a writer, looked fruitlessly through 1-1 boxes of documents from the city's Office of Civil Defense to find references for the Brooklyn Bridge stockpile. The research throw light about the period when authorities wished to shelter their communities to weather the effects of an or hydrogen bomb. Amid fears of Axis ruin, the city's Office of Civilian Defense was made in 1941 under Mayor Fiorello H. Manhunter Guardia. From the 1950's, publications were wanting to anticipate what might occur if, say, a bomb were dropped on Manhattan. "The explanations of the effect of nuclear war were nearly adult within their lurid details," said Kenneth N. Increased, a at California State University at Chico. "There was a desire for the apocalyptic." The town records show that worries ratcheted upward between your late 50's and the first 60's. One of the citizens employed to assist with formulations and exercises was a attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, who became deputy manager of civil protection for the Bronx in 1954, based on a publication in-the documents. (Mr. Morgenthau, 8-6, continues to be the Manhattan district attorney because 1975.) In 1956, town authorities suggested searching up flower beds in-the plaza before the New York Public Library to develop a "hydrogen age" bomb shelter for up to 30 people. Together with your suggestion," Robert Moses, the parks commissioner, wrote to Robert E "i disagree emphatically. Condon, the director of civil defense. "In truth I'll perhaps not accept the building of this type of protection in just about any park area in Ny City." The period also marked the beginnings of the peace movement that will acquire power throughout the Vietnam War. "All civil defense can perform would be to scare kiddies and deceive the general public in to thinking there's security against an H-Bomb," reported a pamphlet calling for a Defense Protest Day on May 3, 1960, in City Hall Park. "The time has come perhaps not for civil defense exercises but for unceasing needs for world-wide disarmament." Following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, town arrangements for nuclear war increased, bolstered by federal money. The Waldorf-Astoria became the very first resort in the city to become stockpiled with fallout-shelter materials, based on a 1963 city news release. An Urgent Situation Mass Feeding Manual from 1964 described the city's suggestion that heirs of the possible strike complement "specially ready grain biscuits" with citrus juices, peanut butter and jelly. "This is ridiculous, and people eventually understood that it was," said Allan M. Winkler, a at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, that has published extensively on cold war concerns. "Maybe the cookies could be great, perhaps not. All hell was going to break free, if a went off and these types of modern attempts weren't going to create much of the difference." John S. Boyer, a at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, mentioned an indication of naivete as the Brooklyn Bridge ton shouldn't be construed simply. "Throughout this time, there clearly was a massive degree of doubt about this civil security strategy of fall-out shelters and stockpiling," he explained. The cold war concerns were overtaken in the late 60's and early 70's by Vietnam, Watergate and the oil crisis, while relationships between the Usa and the Soviet Union stabilized. At that time, 230,000 structures have been chosen as fall-out shelters within the urban area, based on media stories. In 1979, the city, after unsuccessful attempts to provide away the foods, was spending companies $38 a lot to cart away fall-out materials from a few of the 10,800 houses over the city where they still set. Approximately 350,000 of these cookies, in gleaming, watertight bins, escaped damage. They're still within the Brooklyn Bridge, awaiting authorities to determine their destiny. Iris Weinshall, the transport commissioner, got a few of the cookies present in the link to City Hall and offered them to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "I asked her whether she wanted me to consume one, she said no, she'd served because the guinea pig and had been prepared to compromise her palette for your city," "One mouthful was said by him and she spit it out, was my understanding." The mayor was politely corrected by ms. Weinshall, in an interview,. She took two hits and consumed the 2nd to the very first, but "could perhaps not comprehend swallowing". "It felt like cardboard, but with an awful backbite that remained in-your mouth for hours," she said. "I can't think about eating a saltine today without that flavor coming up." * Copyright 2006The New York Times Company