Category Archives: Science/Engineering

The daily (as we used to say in the biz) has “a little fun” with this story of the discovery of a 1950s-60s bomb shelter in the backyard of an Austin-area home. The retired Air Force colonel who had it dug deep into the limestone and outfitted it for weeks of underground living gets ribbed (in the thoughtless modern manner) by the oh-so sophisticated moderns who are so much wiser.

But the colonel knew what he was doing. Ground Zero hereabouts in that time period would have been then-Bergstrom Air Force Base (now Austin’s international airport) because it was a Strategic Air Command base with B-52 bombers loaded with nukes and on standby, ready to fly north and over the pole to Moscow.

Depending on the megatonage of any Russian strike against the base, and whether multiple missiles saturated the area, the shelter could have been vaporized along with much of Austin. If it had survived, it (and the city) would have been under the fallout of radioactive dirt and debris thrown aloft from the base by the explosions and raining down on the area, possibly for days.

That’s all much less likely to happen now. Not because the Rooskies are any more rational than they were then (though they are considerably less armed), but because the tempting target is no more. No more base, no more B-52s and no more nukes. We should be home free. Even the Mullahs are more likely to target the White House or Wall Street than relatively-inconsequential Austin. So our oh-so-sophisticated mockers are free to have all the fun they want.

Via Instapundit.