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Nuke-Proof Bunker Turns Out Not Waterproof
An anonymous reader writes "The AP reports on the opening of a vault in Tulsa, OK which was designed to withstand a nuclear attack by the Russians. 50 years ago they put a Plymouth Belvedere in the vault to preserve it so that we could get a good look at it in the (for that time) magical year of 2007. Unfortunately it turns out that the vault wasn't even waterproof. The once beautiful car is now a literal rust bucket."
Now gimme a break. That was not part of the requirement specifications!
It could have been worse - it could have been a 197o's Ford, in which case all that would have been left would have been the tires and a lump of iron oxide.
It was built to shelter people against radiation, not water. And? How did it not work? Did anyone die from radiation in the area?
See how good it works!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
BTW, the Cold War systems were decommissioned about a decade ago. In the early 1990's the louvers needed painting, so they were removed from building, shipped to someplace (rumor said Texas), painted and then reinstalled. A couple of years later they were removed for good.
Make us think they are going to nuke us and then launch a surprise attack with water pistols.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I think the moral of this story is that archiving anything, even if it seems durable, is hard. Now, how confident do you feel about those backup tapes that are in the closet down the hall? How much moisture is getting to them just from the humidity in the air?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
the story should be looked at carefully by whoever designs nuclear or chemical wast storage areas. 50 years is nothing in comparison to the time frames deposits should last. In this case, there was the unexpected puncture of the hull, which was devastating. It shows how difficult it is to see all aspects of the problem.
Even if the container were waterproof the car would still rust if the humidity wasn't controlled.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
This little gem is why your boss doesn't pay you to think.
-----
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The stock market was abuzz last week, seeing lots of activity in the rust futures markets.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Duck and Cover: Watch on youtube / Download at archive.org (avi/mpg/mp4) / Wikipedia article
Nowadays we can laugh about it but consider that people might laugh in 30 years about what we think now.
I'll stick up for the recent cars.
Especially in the '50s and '60s, design was only about form; huge sacrifices in function were made to have those pretty shapes. For me, a simple and functional design is much more honest and appealing. When I see '50s and '60s cars, I just see an enormous waste of space and weight, that doesn't contribute to performance, comfort, safety, economy, or any other part of the function of a car. I have the same reaction to those cars that I have to PC cases with fins and lights on them.
For me, some of the best designs ever are on very ordinary cars; they are those that allowed unusual innovations in function. The '86-'89 Honda Accord; the original Chrysler minivans; the current Prius (not for anything having to do with its propulsion, but for its packaging); the Volvo 145 wagon and its numerous descendants (through to the 740 and 960/V90 wagons); the first Scion xB, and, for an example from the '50s, the Mini.
And even from a purely aesthetic perspective, I find simpler better. Some of the prettiest cars for me are the '93 Mazda MX-6; the '92 Acura Legend; the current Audi A6 and A8 (especially the S8); both the original Infiniti G35 and new G37 coupes; and of course the 2000-era Volkswagens (the previous generation of Golfs, Jettas, and Passats). I'll be in the market for a new car in about a year and a half; if nothing changes, I'll probably buy a G37.
That's true but 50 years ago rust wasn't very well understood, in America. Most things were still being built from wood at the time. It wasn't until the American elite began to learn European languages and the Queens English sufficiently well to make themselves understood abroad that they were able to make the most of the cultural and scientific aid on offer from Europe and learn about things like rust.
Your first problem is that you believe that there actually was a cold war.
Tell it, brother! And that "holocaust" never happened, either! And together, we'll expose that pack of lies that these so-called "world wars" happened, as well!
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
You see this is what happens when you get too many water chips. Vault 8, anyone?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Ive remember hearing stories about this car growing up. It was really neat watching Ms. Belvedere (thats what we call her) finally come out of the ground. It was a little disappointing to see her rusted out, but it gives her character. They took guesses at what the population would be in 2007, and the very first guess was 388,000, and the population figure they are using is 380,000. That was one hell of a guess. Whoever guesses closest wins the car. I hope they give it to a museum. She belongs to all of Tulsa. Take that Oklahoma City!!!
What's so worthless about duck and cover? In the event you're not close enough to be vaporized or significantly irradiated, why would you want to just stand up and die due to head injury if you have an opportunity to protect yourself? Plus it's useful for natural disasters.
And most importantly of all, it helped traumatize the public, keeping them in the palms of exploitive politicians.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Wait wait wait... a rant about liking older cars is now insightful?
Dude - you're not the only one. In fact, there are millions like you around the world. There are car collector clubs, shows, magazines, books, damn near entire TOWNS dedicated to the preservation and appreciation of older cars. Some of these cars sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars (even millions) depending on rarity and condition. You can't seriously be unaware of this. It's one of the most common hobbies out there. Shit, in ANY North American city at this time of year, you're bound to see one drive by every few minutes if you open your eyes.
Are we here at Slashdot actually this unaware of what goes on in the "real world", that not only can someone ask this with a straight face, but it's "Insightful"?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The story says it is a "literal rust bucket". No, it is not a literal rust bucket, it is a FIGURATIVE rust bucket. This is a literal rust bucket. Actually, no, that isn't a literal rust bucket either, that is a literal rusty bucket, a literal rust bucket would be a bucket which holds rust.
in 1972 there was somne excavation work being done 30 ft away, they said back then that they thought they might have damaged it but the city did nothing to fix the problem.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
In Soviet Russia, bunkers are waterproof but not nuke-proof.
is that they put the gasoline in there because they thought the world would be so advanced in the 21st century that we would've moved way beyond that. :P
Given how much radiation sickness sucks and the fatality rate, being close enough to die of a head trauma guarantees being close enough to die from radiation poisoning. OF the two I'd prefer head trauma.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'm sure we could find the same car (same model, same year) that's been used every day since the 50s in better shape! No joke.
...pay a visit to the Minuteman Missle National Historic Site in South Dakota. They offer tours of an underground Minuteman Delta launch bunker on a appointment-only basis, 6-8 to a group. The bunker itself, built in the 60's, is actually an air-tight, climate-controlled concrete capsule suspended on giant shock absorbers about 150 feet below the surface. The only entrance into the capsule is via a 5-ton vault door that could be opened and shut in under a minute. It provides a fascinating insight into the Cold War and the level of redundancy that was in place to ensure that if a launch was ordered, it would happen (for instance, launch orders would be given to a number of different launch sites simultaneously, so no launch site personnel would be aware of who actually launched a missle).
Interesting story: There was an "emergency egress" hatch in the capsule that led to the surface through a corrugated pipe. There were only a few problems: The hatch door weighed over 200 pounds and dropped down from the ceiling, ensuring the first one out would probably be the last one out. And the government was afraid the Russkies knew where the egress points were on the surface, so the government poured a parking lot over it. Only problem was they failed to tell the launch controllers that their "emergency egress" system led to the underside of a parking lot. This was all top-secret stuff, never came to light until after the sites were decommissioned and dismantled.
It's a contest! Some lucky person actually gets to win that old, rusted-out bucket!
From the award letter:
CONGRATULATIONS! You have won this 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, stored in a time capsule 50 years ago! (See picture)
Please make arrangements to have the vehicle moved off of city property as soon as possible or we will have to start fining you $50/day.
I saw the car buried and now I've seen it dug back up. It was built to withstand a nuclear bomb because fear of nuclear war was on everyone's mind in 1957, but it was never intended to be anything other than a vault for the car. At the time Tulsa's largest employer was Douglas Aircraft, building Boeing B-47 bombers for the Strategic Air Command, so Tulsa folks considered the town a prime target for a nuke attack.
The car was buried in a spirit of celebration of Oklahoma's 50th anniversary of statehood, but I think in many people's minds, they thought it might be the only thing that survived the unavoidable nuclear attack. (What a legacy, eh?)
As far as the bunker not being very good protection against a nuke, we school kiddies of the time were being taught to duck under our desks and cover our necks when we saw the flash of a nuclear explosion. If THAT was good enough... just imagine how cool a concrete-covered bunker was.
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
I'm amazed not one slashdotter here realized the point I'm about to make.
Most revisionist historians often reflect on the fear that Americans had of being obliterated in the 1950s from a nuclear catastrophe. For a midwestern American city in 1957 to have a contest to determine how many would be living there in 50 years and especially predict the winning guesser (or closest of kin) would be alive in 50 demonstrates there was hope for a future.
Once money does not matter anymore all that matters is the satisfaction of having done a good job and created a perfect product as well as the non monetary recognition from your peers of having done a good job.
The flaw in your logic is the assumption that most people care about doing a good job. The vast majority of people choose to maximize the pleasure in their lives, generally through leisure. You seriously think the garbage man cares about doing the best job he can? Or the bookkeeper? Or the assembly line worker? Hell no. Most people just want to get through the day with as little effort as possible so they can make it to the weekend when they can go fishing. Once money doesn't matter anymore and there is little penalty for mediocrity, why would someone care about his *job*, which is the least fun part of their life?
Of course, I'm not even addressing the lack of incentives for innovation.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What's interesting about 'duck and cover' (and other civil defense campaigns from the era) is that it's nowhere near as useless as it sounds. The primary kill mechanism of a nuclear bomb (not 'neutron bomb', which really should be called 'reduced blast nuclear weapon'), so being in cover can help a lot. The secondary kill mechanism is prompt radiation, manifesting as the flash - likewise, if that doesn't hit you, then you have a much greater chance of survival. The tertiary mechanism is fallout, and it's one that a lot of systems are designed to minimize (who wants to conquer a highly radioactive landscape?); most fallout comes from the actual explosion cloud touching down, sucking in dirt particles that are rendered highly radioactive. Because of this, a lot of work was done to minimize the fireball radius - and also most warheads were designed to airburst high enough to avoid the problem. You can read about this in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and also in a number of discussions of the issue in various defense studies/international studies journals.
What's REALLY interesting is why we, in the West, abandoned civil defense. With the wholesale adoption of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory, it was considered a DOWNSIDE to be able to save one's population - so civil defense, missile defense, air defense, and shelters all vanished from the budget. The theory being that you want everyone to be as vulnerable as possible - because otherwise the cost of launching a nuclear strike may seem low enough to make a nuclear war palatable. It amazes me to this day that the US persuaded its allies to buy into that theory. Yes, nuclear war sucks - but it seems that maximizing the damage it would do to you in the name of avoiding one is rather shortsighted. That's especially true in the post-cold war multipolar world. It's hard to say 'MAD works' when suddenly you are trying to deter anyone capable of building a nuclear device - which overall, really isn't that hard to do.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
When I was a kid, they were still teaching us "nuclear preparedness drills."
They included such gems as (I am not making these up):
"If you hear the nuclear explosion, do not look toward the sound, because the flash of light will blind you." (Wow! I guess atomic sound travels faster than the speed of light!)
and...
"Hide under your desks until the teacher says it is okay."
and...
"If you see a bright flash of light, and there is a giant cloud shaped like a mushroom, tell your teacher immediately."
That's the funny thing about deterrence in general. The only way to prove that it worked is to prove a negative - there wasn't a nuclear war. It's pretty much impossible to prove a negative, so we can't be sure that the cold war didn't turn nuclear-hot because we deterred the soviets (and were in turn deterred by them). Do we really want to rely on the same unprovable approach in the new, multi-polar world (especially when Chinese leaders have in the past commented that China shouldn't fear nuclear war, because a few million deaths would still leave them with many million more people - I believe that was Mao, but Deng Zhaou Ping [spelling?] supposedly repeated it)?
There are broadly three ways to look at it (from a military/strategic point of view, since all this really does is support the political/diplomatic arena anyway); not mutually exclusive:
- Rely on deterrence. It might be existential deterrence (that is, "we have nukes - they deter"), or it might include a genuine willingness to use the weapons if a certain line is crossed. If it isn't obvious that you will use them at a certain point, the deterrent loses credibility - and your influence is whittled down by a thousand papercuts (see below). Some deterrence theorists have stated that a nuclear-armed neighborhood is a polite neighborhood, although the jury is still out on that (certainly Israel, India and Pakistan have had no shortage of wars since becoming nuclear powers).
- Rely on might. In this case, you want to have a really effective nuclear force, the strongest defenses you can afford, and a doctrine that makes it obvious that you will escalate to the nuclear option if you need to.
- Rely on arms control. Basically attempt to keep the lid on the nuclear can of worms as much as possible, and try to agree upon arms levels with other countries. The only problem here is that it's really easy to agree arms control with countries you weren't really going to fight anyway, and rather hard to agree with countries with whom you are genuinely likely to have a shooting war.
I remember talking to some of Bush Senior's administration while I was in college, talking about their discussions of the nuclear option in Gulf War 1. A large part of the government wanted to rule it out altogether, regardless of chemical-biological threats. A committee did actually draft a strategy for using tactical nukes in the initial attack, but it was ruled out very fast - not because of long-term problems (a small tac-nuke isn't much worse for the environment than an FAE), but because it would have taken far too many tactical nukes to really make much difference militarily! In the end, the decision was made to formally "not rule anything out" if Hussein used chemical/biological weapons; a decision to not have a policy. Discussions were ongoing, but an answer was never forthcoming to "will we even consider using nukes?" - let alone "how badly do they have to hit us before we'll consider it?" I'm told that similar discussions occurred for various other small-medium regional contingencies over the years.
On the other hand, we've built up the word about deterrence so strongly (including the nuclear armed neighborhood statement!) that world leaders who might be invaded are all scrambling to get nuclear weapons. Even if they don't plan to use them (who knows?), it's a fair gamble that the big powers will be less willing to invade if it means a nuclear attack.
One day, there will be a small nuclear war with modern weapons. When the dust settles, and we discover that it was nothing like Armageddon, the can will be off the nuclear can of worms forever - and we'll be stuck having to come up with policies that rely on capability and actions, rather than an abstract, unprovable and arguably purely philosophical notion of deterrence.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net