Abstract
Their shelter was designed to protect them from everything–except phone calls
Watch out below
The Mininsons then (above) and now (right), in Miami.
In a recent conversation, the Mininsons told me they learned about the bomb-shelter honeymoon listening to the radio on a date. A Miami radio station, in conjunction with Bomb Shelters, Inc., was seeking a marriage-minded couple willing to spend the first two weeks of wedlock in one of the company's fallout shelters. The couple was promised a “real,” all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Mexico following their stay in the shelter.
“I just looked over at Maria and we both knew it was now or never,” says Mel Mininson.
The Mininsons, who had been dating for 10 years, were chosen from nearly 100 couples. Paul Indianer, the owner of the shelter company (whose business card featured a mushroom cloud and the slogan, “It will save your life”), told me that he chose the Mininsons because he and Mel graduated from the same high school. Maria's stunning good looks also helped.
On July 12, 1959, they tied the knot in an outdoor ceremony attended by friends, family, and county officials. After the reception, the couple descended into a 6-by-14-foot shelter–and into the annals of atomic pop culture. The county sheriff officially sealed the exit hatch. A large calendar nearby marked the number of days until the hatch would be reopened.
The first thing Mel and Maria noticed about their honeymoon suite was the heat. On some days the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. They later learned that the shelter's concrete walls had not been properly cooled and that the 22-ton structure had been built in a hurry to meet contest deadlines.
The Mininsons performed various civil defense-related tasks like applying lime to their chemical toilet and operating the air filtration system with a hand crank. They also played cards and argued about checkers.
All this activity, combined with an intense publicity campaign, left little time for boredom. According to Maria, although the couple was “protected” from radioactive fallout, they were not shielded from the public's interest in their adventure. The shelter's “hotline” phone rang continually: “Our parents, Civil Defense, the newspapers, or the radio station would call us every hour on the hour.…My mother-in-law would shout, ‘Are you ok down there, Maria?’” Civil Defense officials were particularly obsessed with food. Says Mel, “They wanted to know how we prepared the food, what we prepared, what cans we used, why we didn't eat the peanut butter.”
The art of impending doom
In 1976, Canadian artist Dr. Art Nuko–an alias–hatched the idea of a world tour of his paintings, each depicting one of the world's cities engulfed in a nuclear detonation. “If we are to avoid using nuclear weapons in the future,” says the artist, “we must see the conseguences of our actions now.”
The tour included a 1978 trip to San Francisco, several exhibitions throughout Canada, and a 1986 exhibition at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Prefecture Museums in Japan. The artist rolls out his work whenever, in his view, world tensions demand. The paintings traveled to Egypt during the first Intifada, for example; to the Soviet Union in 1988; and to Jordan during the Persian Gulf conflict.
The exhibit sat dormant for almost 10 years due to lack of money and, according to the artist, “paranoia on the part of the curator, Amb. Arthur R.T. Nukeau.”
“The show sits in crates in their concrete bunker, deep in the remote mountains of British Columbia,” says the artist, who hopes to display it “in Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Islamabad, New Delhi, and Beijing.”
Until then, however, Al Rycroft of Canada's Victoria Peace Centre has another solution for the world tour–the World Wide Web. Last October, responding to unrest in the Middle East, he launched the “Virtual Art Nuko World Tour” (www.artnuko.webside.ca) where 17 of Dr. Nuko's 30 paintings are displayed.
“Testing Allah's Will in Pakistan,” courtesy Dr. Art Nuko.
On July 25, a bearded Mel and a beaming Maria emerged from the “officially unsealed” shelter. After a celebratory dinner featuring entertainment by comedian Henny Youngman, the Mininsons embarked on their “real” honeymoon.
Maria says that before the Bulletin, no one had ever approached her or her husband for a follow-up story. “We moved on with our lives,” says Maria, who worked for 33 years with Florida's Refugee Services program before retiring in 1994. Mel works in the industrial chemical and supplies business.
Although they were shocked that anyone would find their unusual honeymoon interesting today, Loretta, the Mininsons' only child, thinks otherwise. “My parents are a part of history,” she says.
Even though the couple feels their honeymoon helped to “raise the consciousness” of the public, Maria thinks some of the civil defense plans of the era were simply a way to “keep people from panicking.”
Asked if she had any advice for couples today, Maria responded, “Take your time, get to know each other before you get married. That way there won't be any surprises.”
Were there any surprises in that shelter 41 years ago? Yes. One of the Mininsons–we aren't sure which–cheats at checkers.
Jumping Jehosabots!
One of Sandia's hopping helpers
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have developed several robot prototypes that can jump up to 30 feet in the air, right themselves after landing, and go off to hop again. Using combustion power and a piston-driven foot, some of the robots make tall leaps while others bunny-hop for miles before petering out.
The idea for the hop-bots “jumped” into researcher Rush Robinett's mind as he was collecting bait for a trout fishing trip. “I was watching how the grasshoppers maneuvered around and figured we could build a robot that could do that, too,” he said. A jumping robot is more mobile than its tracked or wheeled counterparts. “If you have a robot the size of a shoe-box, it could barely climb over an obstacle half that size,” Robinett said. A hopping robot can just jump over it.
Robinett and his colleagues envision a variety of roles for their creations. Lightweight, softball-sized robots could become interplanetary explorers, unhampered by difficult terrain.
Back on Earth, a “throwbot,” equipped with cameras and sensors like its space-faring siblings, could be used by swat teams as a scout.
And if nasa and swat teams don't want the gadgets, maybe children will–Robinett sees the orthopteran-inspired technology as a bonanza for the toy market.
But the military likes new toys, too. Enter the dark side of the hoppers. Sandia scientists are incorporating hopping robotics into “intelligent mobile landmines”–anti-tank landmines that communicate via sensors and radios to recognize when a mine has been removed and then relocate by hopping into a new pattern. Each book-sized mine can hop to a new location about 100 times.
The Defense Department bills the “self-healing” minefield as an alternative to antipersonnel landmines and hopes it will be permissible under the Ottawa Convention, which the United States is slated to sign in 2006.
Greening the Red Planet
In any case, the October 21 New Scientist included two reports on a meeting in mid-October at NASA's Ames Research Center in California where some projects were discussed that might eventually make Mars a little too much like good old Earth:
First, Margarita Marinova of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and some of her colleagues suggested that 20 nuclear-powered “factories” or more could emit enough greenhouse gases to heat the Martian atmosphere by 5 degrees Celsius over the course of a hundred years, making it warm enough to melt the polar ice caps, which would release carbon dioxide and water. That, in turn, would trigger even greater warming.
NASA's drone plane.
And if even more potent greenhouse gases than the familiar CFCs–chloro-fluorocarbons–were developed, said Marinova, the time needed to get the melt going might be cut to as little as 10 years. Mimi Gerstell of the California Institute of Technology and Joe Francisco of Purdue are already busy designing the chemical brew for just such gases.
Meanwhile, as the second report indicated, Charlie Cockell of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge has been testing insects to see how well they could survive in a low-pressure atmosphere like that of Mars. Cockell found (somewhat unsurprisingly) that cockroaches, among other insects, can continue reproducing normally at only one-tenth of an Earth atmosphere. “That means they could be brought in at the early stages of terraforminq,” Cockell concluded.
NASA has just announced several new missions to Mars, one of which will include a flyover of the surface by a drone plane. But the space agency is still silent on a date for a manned expedition.
Still, it's nice to know that when mankind finally gets to Mars, its old friend the cockroach family could be waiting, making up an all-too-familiar welcoming party.
The fungus among us
Space programs do take precautions. They fill spacecraft, before launch, with poisonous gases. Crews are quarantined days before a flight. Strict housekeeping and filtering systems are supposed to prevent microbes from establishing their own space colonies.
But fungi have turned out to be tough. Real tough. They get inside plastics where even toxic gases can't reach them, emerging later–scientists don't know exactly why–to wreak their havoc. They can lie dormant for months until they're activated by the right climate. And they not only thrive in space, they procreate. Some fungi found inside Mir in 1995 were descendants of fungi discovered on the station in 1988.
According to a July 27 Space.com article, on one recent Mir mission the crew watched as their view from a porthole slowly deteriorated behind an unidentified film. Microbiologists later examined the hardened quartz porthole and found it partly destroyed by a fungal colony and bacteria visible to the naked eye.
The porthole invasion isn't an isolated instance. Pull out any insulation on Mir and you'll probably find fungus, according to the October 10 Boston Globe. Visitors to the station have found fungal patches behind control panels, in the air conditioning, on communications equipment, and elsewhere. Scientists have identified 107 species of fungus on Mir.
When these microorganisms feed on skin flakes and other byproducts of human activity, they produce organic acids that corrode steel, glass, or plastic. And as ornery as these fungi are, the heavy radiation of space–which can be 500 times more intense than on Earth–can significantly mutate them into even tougher breeds. One NASA radiation health manager quoted in the Globe claims that one-tenth of 1 percent of bacterial spores would mutate after a year-long mission to Mars.
Some evidence suggests that increased solar activity also makes fungi more aggressive–so, as it turns out, the race for Mars isn't just an engineering challenge, but a biological one as well.
In Brief
When Indian Army border forces captured a hawk in Rajasthan in November, they claimed it had been outfitted with cameras, radar, and other eavesdropping devices by Pakistan (Gulf News, November 21, 2000). But Pakistani Rangers claimed it was the Indians who were sending out reconnoitering pigeons and birds of prey which, the Rangers said, they needed to shoot down. When asked how they would distinguish between innocent Pakistani birds and India's avian spies, the Rangers said they would only shoot at birds fitted with electronic equipment.
On July 24,1979, Public Citizen, a public watchdog group, petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (nrc) to declare the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to be “an extraordinary nuclear occurrence,” which would have barred the reactor owner from using certain legal defenses against potential liability suits. In October 2000–more than 21 years later–the nrc responded to Public Citizen, denying the request.
In May, Greenpeace U.K. sent out an estimated 500 mouse pads made from rubber from the rain forest–part of a promotional campaign to highlight Greenpeace's work to protect the Amazon. Over the next few months, however, some of the pads became discolored. Greenpeace ordered a laboratory analysis, which showed that the pads were contaminated with fspores and could cause an allergic reaction in individuals with sensitive skin. The organization has now written to all the people who received the pads, asking them to send them back (bbc, October 20, 2000).
Now that his ordeal as spy suspect is over, Wen Ho Lee is writing a tell-all, first-person book, and he will be the subject of a four-hour, two-night television miniseries slated to run this fall on abc (Albuquerque Journal, November 21, 2000).
While you were sleeping, the risk of attack by killer asteroids doubled. The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research Program (linear) has located so many “earth-crossing asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter” that, just since last January, researchers have upped the estimated number of threatening asteroids from 500 to more than 1,000. Linear head Grant Stokes says the risk of a catastrophic collision is twice as great as previously thought, but admits that it's still “really small” (Albuquerque Journal, October 24, 2000).
In 1950, the British Chiefs of Staff warned that the Soviet Union could, if it wanted, “march to the Atlantic at any moment.” The only way to prevent a potential invasion was to convince the Russians that Britain had a robust nuclear deterrent. In a 1950 “top secret” paper released by Britain's Public Record Office on October 27, 2000, the Chiefs decreed that Britain would employ “judicious anticipation.” “It may be necessary,” they said, “to undertake a number of overt steps, i.e., to simulate the trials of weapons, the results of which may not only deceive the enemy but also our own people.”
The U.S. Defense Department has stopped monitoring the air in Key West for radiation from two Cuban nuclear reactors that were never completed. The crews program–a.k.a. the Caribbean Radiation Early Warning System–was set up last year on the theory that two unfinished nuclear power plants in Cienfuegos would, if completed, release radiation that would drift over the southeastern United States. The crews “sniffers”–air sampling stations at four colleges along the Gulf Coast–were intended to detect much smaller leaks than other monitoring equipment. The sampling stations have been turned over to the schools, which use them to monitor air quality (Sun-Sentinel, October 29, 2000).
According to Russell Working, writing in the South China Morning Post (November 24, 2000), the Russian city of Vladivostok has 266 bomb shelters. Sixty businesses now lease space in those shelters, including one that is among “the most secure bakeries on the planet.” The shelter/bakery has steel doors, reinforced concrete walls, air conditioning that includes a filter to scrub radioactive contamination from the air, an electrical generator–and enough space to sleep 2,000. Still, it was probably a good thing it was never put to the ultimate test. Bakery owner Sergei Prischepin–who was a member of the crew that built the shelter–says that if they had ever imagined they would someday use it to bake bread, “We would have built it better.”
Russian nuclear shelters now house many businesses, including this restaurant
Whose Einstein?
“Well, as it turns out, Einstein was also adopted by the National Atomic Museum, located on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico–although it seems less clear that Einstein would have embraced a museum dedicated to glorifying the bomb.
The museum is at the heart of Sandia National Laboratories, the largest of Kirtland's many nuclear-related tenants. Among its exhibits are bomb casings for almost all made-in-the-U.S.A. nuclear weapons, beginning with Little Boy and Fat Man. Outside are most of the airplanes, artillery pieces, and missiles that have had a nuclear mission. On a hot day, one can find shady respite in the open bomb bay of a B-52.
The museum's front rooms have images of Albert Einstein scattered about here and there. And the tiny museum shop stocks far more posters of Einstein than of weapons (and more peculiarly, posters with Einstein and weapons).
The shop had 15 different Ein-steins in mid-October. All featured his image, either photographic or artistic, and many included pithy aphorisms–“I want to know God's thoughts…the rest are details”; “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater”; “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
The museum's favorite Einstein is unquestionably the one reproduced here.
Bill Geerhart is the co-creator of Conelrad.com, a web site devoted to atomic pop culture. Linda Rothstein is editor of the Bulletin, Mike Moore is senior editor, Bret Lortie is managing editor, and Catherine Auer is assistant editor.