Leftovers from the Cold War.Workers inspecting New York's Brooklyn Bridge Brooklyn Bridge, vehicular suspension bridge, New York City, southernmost of the bridges across the East River, between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn; built 1869–83. The achievement of J. A. Roebling and his son W. A. Roebling, it has a span of 1,595. in March became accidental archaeologists when they discovered a relic of the Cold War: Deep inside the 123-year-old bridge's foundation was a fallout shelter stocked with Adj. 1. stocked with - furnished with more than enough; "rivers well stocked with fish"; "a well-stocked store" stocked furnished, equipped - provided with whatever is necessary for a purpose (as furniture or equipment or authority); "a furnished apartment"; water drums, medical kits, and 352,000 canisters of "survival crackers." The boxes of supplies were dated 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik Sputnik: see satellite, artificial; space exploration. Sputnik Any of a series of Earth-orbiting spacecraft whose launching by the Soviet Union inaugurated the space age. satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, major cold war confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the USSR increased its support of Fidel Castro's Cuban regime, and in the summer of 1962, Nikita Khrushchev secretly decided to heightened U.S.-Soviet tensions and the threat of nuclear war. During the Cold War, schools held air-raid drills and civil-defense agencies set up shelters in public buildings for protection against fallout--the shower of radioactive particles following a nuclear blast. Even at the time, some experts doubted whether the shelters would be effective; most were dismantled during the 1980s. |
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