A routine structural inspection of New York's landmark Brooklyn Bridge has unearthed a forgotten Cold War-era stockpile of survival rations to be used in the event of a nuclear attack.
The cache of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and several hundred thousand calorie-packed crackers was found inside a vault in the bridge's masonry foundations, the New York Times said Tuesday.
The find, made last Wednesday, is especially significant because many of the supplies were packaged in boxes stamped with two evocative years in Cold War history: 1957, which saw the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite, and 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University who specialises in the Cold War, said US civil defence agencies were building fallout shelters all over the country in the 1950s and stocking them with survival provisions.
"Most of these have been dismantled; the crackers got mouldy a very long time ago," Gaddis told the Times. "It's kind of unusual to find one fully intact -- one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don't know of a recent example of that."
The city's transportation department, which controls the Brooklyn Bridge, has moved to secure the site pending a decision on what to do with the find.
And the health department was called in to handle the drugs, which included supplies of Dextran for treating shock.
"We find stuff all the time," said Transport Commissioner Iris Weinshall. "But what's sort of eerie about this is that this is a bridge that thousands of people go over each day.
"They walk over it, cars go over it, and this stuff was just sitting there," Weinshall said.