Cold War supplies inside the Brooklyn Bridge

For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.

For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack.

Workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the Cold War-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers 8212; an estimated 351,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and seems, still edible.

To step inside the vault8212; a dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes 8212; is to be vividly reminded of the anxieties that dominated American life during the military rivalry with the Soviet Union, an era when air-raid sirens and fallout shelters were standard elements of the grade-school curriculum.

Several historians said on Monday that the find was exceptional, in part because many of the cardboard boxes of supplies were ink-stamped with two especially significant years in Cold War history: 1957, when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis seemed to bring the world to the precipice of nuclear destruction.

8220;Civil defence agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country during the 1950s and stocking them with supplies of food and water and what not,8221; said John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale and a pre-eminent scholar of the Cold War.

8220;Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got mouldy a very long time ago. It8217;s kind of unusual to find one fully intact 8212; one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don8217;t know of a recent example of that.8221;

The Department of Transportation, which controls the bridge, has moved to secure the site while figuring out what to do with the supplies.

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The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been contacted to handle the drugs, which include Dextran, used to prevent shock.

City workers commonly find coins or bottles when repaving streets, fixing water mains or probing sewer drains, said the transportation commissioner, Iris Weinshall.

SEWELL CHAN