Bomb Shelter Research Articles

Preface: Influence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist

PrefaceInfluence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist David Paul Deavel This past June marked the sixth annual Walker Percy Weekend held in St. Francisville, Louisiana, part of the West Feliciana Parish that was the fictionalized "Feliciana Parish" setting for some of Percy's greatest novels. Limited to four hundred tickets, the two-day festival starts with registration at a bookstore, a casual conversation with organizer Rod Dreher (of The Benedict Option fame), and an opening night party in the cemetery at Grace Episcopal Church, shaded by beautiful oak trees. The second day is the day of substantive intellectual engagement about Percy with nationally known speakers. Past Percy Weekend lecturers include Percy scholars Ralph Wood and biographers Jay Tolson and Patrick Samway, SJ. This year's speakers were perhaps even more up-market, with New York Times columnist David Brooks, best-selling Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance, and journalist Walter Isaacson, best-selling biographer of Leonardo DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs. The final events of the festival are—in the spirit of an author whose celebrated essay "Bourbon, Neat" proposed a few [End Page 5] bourbon shots in order to "warm the heart, reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons"—a "progressive front porch and bourbon-tasting tour" and a "crawfish and craft beer celebration."1 With such a lineup of speakers, culinary offerings, and alcoholic delights in a romantic locale, selling four hundred tickets isn't hard. One could sell out four hundred tickets with a generic literary festival without mention of Percy. But my guess is that the hard-core enthusiasts who come to the Walker Percy Weekend would also consent to spending their weekend in the public library in Paducah, Kentucky, or a bomb shelter in Sheboygan to talk about Percy's life, work, and importance. For Percy is one of those writers who is valued not just for the purity of his art—like Homer, he nodded at times—but for the purity of his search for truth. Chesterton observed that one of the problems with news is often that we read about the death of persons we never knew lived. My own discovery of Percy was this way. I had begun reading Flannery O'Connor in high school and happened to read an article in my denominational magazine about another southern Catholic author who had just died in May 1990. While the author, later a professor of mine at Calvin College, "had me at 'Flannery O'Connor,'" I was doubly intrigued by the story of the writer who had come from a family of suicides, survived, and found strength in a Christian faith that didn't simply solve his problems but made them understandable as part of a journey. Given that my own father had a history of mental health issues, some of which had flared up again around the same time Percy died, my adolescent concern was that I too would inherit them. At one point in that summer of 1990 I had had a kind of small breakdown about my sanity that lasted several days. My Christian Reformed pastor, a saintly World War II veteran named Charles Terpstra, came over to the house on the second day with some information about mental health issues and some stories about his wife's family, who also had a history of mental illness. Pastor Terpstra's help got me out of the house on the third day. I was [End Page 6] ripe, however, for Percy, who, in the article I read, struck me as the kind of man and author who had faced down the crazy in the world and the crazy within. I immediately went to the library and picked up the Percy on hand, his 1980 novel, The Second Coming. Given that my own father's long-time diagnosis was schizophrenia, it was perhaps providential that I came upon this volume. The main character, Will Barrett, a retired widower who has tasted of life's successes but finds them wanting, is haunted both by the suspicion that life is meaningless, because God either doesn't exist or doesn't care, and...

Evaluation of the Durability of a Nuclear Bomb Shelter Made with Anti-Sievert® Concrete

ABSTRACTWe have developed Anti- Sievert® concrete, which is a concrete reinforced shielding function as a building material that shields the influence from radioactive materials and its radiation. Cement, water, aggregate, sand material, Anti- Sievert® # 210, Anti- Sievert® # 216 formulation was optimized as those materials constituting Anti- Sievert® concrete. As a result, we realized shielding concrete with high fluidity to realize construction suitability by concrete pump[1]. Anti- Sievert® concrete has a shielding function of about 3 times as compared with ordinary concrete with respect to X ray (100 kV), and shows strength of more than 50 N/mm2. The durability characteristics against nuclear explosion using Anti-Sievert® concrete were simulated and reported in this paper.

Orchestrating experts’ assumptions and children’s values in the design of Virtual Heritage experiences

Abstract The roles that children are allowed to play in the co-design of an interactive experience are strongly influenced and determined by the views of designers and other adult stakeholders on childhood, as well as by their expectations of children’s skills and cognitive capacities. In this paper, we contrast these assumptions in the design of a Virtual Heritage experience for guided school visits at an archaeological site. The goal of our study was to analyse different viewpoints of adult stakeholders in order to find new strategies that balance power relations between adults and children. The study was carried out in the context of the preliminary design stage of an interactive learning experience for a bomb shelter dating from the Spanish Civil War, known as “Refugi 307”. Our analysis reveals some of the reasons behind the assumptions of adult stakeholders. These outcomes were our starting point for defining strategies that can establish collective values among adult stakeholders and enrich the range of roles of children in a design process.

Learning about the past through situatedness, embodied exploration and digital augmentation of cultural heritage sites

Abstract The design of interactive experiences for archaeological sites entails the consideration of the particular characteristics and constraints of the exhibition space. Our aim is to address these challenges by exploring the potential of a recently emerging interaction paradigm called World-as-Support, which is based on projective Augmented Reality (AR). In this study, we present the design process of a virtual heritage experience for a bomb shelter built during the Spanish Civil War that currently belongs to the Barcelona History Museum. The goal of this study was twofold. First, we aimed to define the requirements for the design of a first prototype based on the World-as-Support interaction paradigm. Second, we carried out a study with a local school to evaluate the benefits of an educational experience based on this paradigm. Our results indicate benefits to complement the guided visit: (1) by using projective AR to explore different layers of the learning experience; and (2) by including collaborative activities based on embodied enactments to foster the understanding of historical contents that require emotional engagement and critical thinking.

Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir by Jennifer Sinor

Reviewed by: Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir by Jennifer Sinor Gaynell Gavin Jennifer Sinor, Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2017. 279 pp. Paper, $19.95. In a Texas hospital, a young Vietnam veteran was told to choose between the lives of his wife and baby. One would have to be sacrificed to save the other. He chose to save his wife. The baby’s body was disposed of in a bucket after being extracted from the mother, a procedure expected to kill the infant. However, a doctor noticed the baby breathing, and Jennifer Sinor was saved. Hawaii was the place where Sinor’s conscious memory appears to have formed. Sinor’s father, after graduating from law school at the University of Nebraska, was stationed at Pearl Harbor as a naval attorney. Although there were no visible physical scars from her near-death experience at birth, even as a three-year-old she was at least “dimly aware that the oily black water . . . concealed an unknown number of bodies and sunken ships” from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a historic national trauma (8). There was Hawaii’s vibrant beauty, while the family’s backyard offered both a tire swing and a bomb shelter, a juxtaposition paradoxically emblematic of the Cold War, unremarkably normalizing the threat of actual war. Children born into the Cold War absorbed its collective national anxiety, and those years were almost certainly harsher for military families, acutely aware of the threat and of “risks those in the military took” (188). But as a child and “daughter of the military,” Sinor “believes order and regulation will defeat evil and disarray” (64). Ordinary Trauma is a layered, complex, elegantly written memoir of individual and collective trauma. Despite its title, for me part of the conundrum of Sinor’s gripping book became untangling extraordinary from ordinary trauma, while wondering if this endeavor served any purpose. Sinor’s seems a memoir not only of ordinary but extraordinary trauma as well. Most American children born into the Cold War were not almost killed at birth to save their mothers, and repeated instances of extraordinary trauma punctuated Sinor’s life: a serious injury while in the care of a negligent babysitter, a baby brother scalded by a nurse at birth, another who nearly drowned. Surely the landscape of most family life, if probed, would reveal [End Page 134] reservoirs of sorrow beneath the surface, which seems particularly true for Sinor’s Nebraskan paternal lineage. Her father’s father, a farmer, sadistically mistreated his animals and his children, including sexually abusing a daughter and at least one granddaughter. These events raise the vexed question of ordinary versus extraordinary trauma again, although sexual abuse and other family violence remain far too widespread. Perhaps trauma is normalized into ordinariness for most people who experience it. As major forces in her life, Sinor’s parents are important characters in her memoir. Whatever his weaknesses as a parent, her father offered considerable strengths and gave incomparably better fathering than he received. Sinor notes that the same hands that were forced to drown farm kittens when her father was a child, “rocked me to sleep as a baby, held me when I skinned my knee” (37). It is impossible to imagine her abusive paternal grandfather comforting a child with a skinned knee or rocking a baby to sleep. Her own father advised Sinor to shut bad memories in a dresser drawer and not reopen it. In addition to experiencing frequent military transfers, instilling a lack of a sense of home, Sinor presents the military child as riding “the backs of deactivated missiles” and ingesting “mutually assured destruction with her breakfast cereal.” Such ordinary moments may have passed “unnoticed” but “undid you nonetheless,” leading to the eventual realization that “the peace we experience in the United States is one achieved by force” (69–70, 195). At fourteen she wrote in her Holly Hobbie diary, “I think there may be a nuclear war which we will deserve because the world is falling apart” (197). Such moments seem slightly offset by the Star Wars trilogy, paralleling Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program in Sinor’s teen years and...

Mrena [The Cataract] by Milica Micić Dimovska

Reviewed by: Mrena [The Cataract] by Milica Micić Dimovska Milica Mihajlović Milica Micić Dimovska. Mrena [The Cataract], translated by Sibelan Forrester. Media, PA: Parnilis Media, 2016, pp. 306. ISBN 978-1-53502-757-1 Named for both the literal medical condition suffered by a main character and a figurative blindness affecting the other characters, Micić Dimovska's novel examines the societal blindness and complacency in Serbia that contributed to the most recent mass tragedy of former Yugoslavia: the NATO bombardment of Serbia from March 24 to June 10, 1999. To say that the story focuses on the bombardment would be false. The Western threat is barely in the background of the characters' minds—yet that is precisely the point Micić Dimovska is making. Preoccupied with their local political and economic happenings, the characters are largely unaware of the larger crisis facing the country. When the situation in Kosovo is mentioned, it is brushed off as an empty threat or disregarded because Bill Clinton's sex scandal had come to light just the previous year. Not to mention, the novel is set in Novi Sad, located in northern Serbia; the southern positon of Kosovo is quite literally far from their minds. The characters of the novel span three generations, but all are interconnected by their position as the intellectual elite of the city. The middle generation make up the largest percentage of the characters, and the majority of those are directly involved with the central cultural institution of the novel, the Serbian Forum. These are the people that are in charge of the production of culture and art in Serbia. Yet they are all too preoccupied with blossoming relationships, personal career advancements, failing marriages, leadership changes, resistance movements, and their own conflicting political ideologies to notice the large-scale happenings—namely those exacted under the rule of Slobodan Milošević—and the reactions from the rest of the world. Some members of the Serbian Forum want to use their positions to actively further their political agendas. Other characters, such as children and in-laws of the members, represent the complacency that also allowed for such horrors to happen. [End Page 175] Micić Dimovska's personal stance against nationalism and its manipulation of art as propaganda is evident, and her long history at Matica srpska (what is assumed to be the inspiration for the Serbian Forum) in Novi Sad attributes to her a level of expertise. The individual voices of her characters offer a realistic, albeit fictional, snapshot of life in the middle of crisis. While it may be fair to say that hindsight is 20/20 and that leaders are only human, Micić Dimovska does not mean to criticize plain humanity. It is the deliberate behaviors that contribute to the overall blindness, the ones that form the cataract, so to speak, over society's eyes. It is the behaviors of those such as Jovan Žarković and his family, who didn't want to go to the bomb shelter of their building on the ninth day of the bombardment because "they were bothered by the lack of discretion of the gathered residents, the atmosphere of confidentiality and cooperation under the motto 'misfortune has brought us together'" (265). This novel examines a small section of the Serbian case, but it is an example to all of the mechanisms which we allow ourselves to be blinded by daily. [End Page 176] Milica Mihajlović Indiana University mmihajlo@umail.iu.edu Copyright © 2018 Serbian Studies

A better angel of our nature: Hanna Michel "Jean" Khoury, MD (April 24, 1967-May 22, 2017).

A better angel of our nature: Hanna Michel "Jean" Khoury, MD (April 24, 1967-May 22, 2017).

BASF to beautify former bomb shelter

BASF will revamp a concrete former bomb shelter at its headquarters in Ludwigshafen, Germany, into a work space for about 15 employees. Updated with novel materials and a modern design, the 1,000-m2 building will also feature work space for project partners or start-up companies. Additionally, the building will be a center to demonstrate BASF’s Designfabrik materials consulting service and its Ultrasim plastics application simulation tool.

When Land is God

When Land is God

(De)territorializing the home. The nuclear bomb shelter as a malleable site of passage

This paper explores the worldwide unprecedented bunker infrastructure of Switzerland. Since the 1960s, the country has built hundreds of thousands of nuclear bomb shelters in family homes. Drawing on poststructural theories of social practice and ritual theory, the all-pervasive structures in the private sphere are analyzed as transitory spaces that coordinate the movement and connections between different milieus, regimes, and bodies. By studying the operational scripts of the authorities and the spatial arrangements and artifacts of the shelter, the paper argues that a sequenced set of “rites of passage” were to be practiced in order to guarantee a transition into the postapocalypse without any violations of norms, social roles, and affective regimes. However, this “territorializing” process launched by the state with the aim of engineering a “bomb-proof” society met with little success. By ignoring, distorting, or violating the constant prewar situation in their homes, Swiss people, as early as in the 1970s, started to undermine the shelter as an instance of concrete governmentality. Being traversed by various processes of “deterritorialization” the bunker lost its function as a locus of secured passage and transformed into a highly dynamic “empty space” that hides, till this day, residua for creativity and difference.

Living Underground: Bomb Shelters and Daily Lives in Wartime Chongqing (1937–1945)

Because of Japan’s large-scale aerial bombing of Chongqing and the surrounding mountainous natural environment during the Anti-Japanese War, shelters became important places where the residents of wartime Chongqing evaded attacks by Japanese planes. In addition, the differences between the public and private bomb shelter facilities reflected the high and low, noble and humble people in the shelters, indicating the social class differences in wartime Chongqing. Shelters, especially public shelters, also provided places for socializing, recreation, and they had political and economic functions. Thus, bomb shelters became new public living spaces. Living in bomb shelters also became an important component of the daily lives of the residents in wartime Chongqing. Discussing their daily lives in the shelter allows us to not only understand and know the diversity and complexity of the daily lives of Chongqing’s wartime citizens but also reveals the significant impact of the all-encompassing invasion waged by Japan at the micro level.

In Memoriam: M. Colin Jordan, MD

M. Colin Jordan, former Infectious Diseases Division Director and Professor of Medicine at both the University of Minnesota and the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), died April 8, 2015. Colin lived an exceptional life, touching patients and colleagues with his excellence and high expectations as a physician and scientist and his rare combination of warmth and nurturing with cutting, yet understated, humor. He did not talk much about his past, so few may know he was born in a bomb shelter in England in 1941, came to the United States aboard the Queen Elizabeth at age 6, and was signed by Walt Disney studios as a dancer at the age of 12. Colin was an accomplished college baseball player, and after graduation from Loyola Marymount he was offered a contract with the Los Angeles Angels; however, instead of becoming a baseball player, he decided to go into medicine. After medical school at Creighton, he trained at the University of Washington (UW), where he worked with many outstanding clinicians, including their stellar Infectious Diseases group and Bill Kirby, with whom he wrote one of his first papers. His time at UW helped inspire his career, including his becoming an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer from 1970 to 1972. An early indication of both his talent and humor was his publication in the American Journal of Public Health, from an EIS investigation, entitled “Salmonellosis among restaurant patrons: the incisive role of a meat slicer”. After stints as a faculty member at UCLA and Davis, he became Division Chief at the University of Minnesota, serving from 1984 to 1998. At Minnesota, where I had the pleasure of working with him, he developed a strong multi-institution Division into a warm and collegial group. From 1998 to 2005, he served as Chief of ID and the first E.H. Cooley Professor of Medicine at OHSU. A staunch believer that scientifically well trained clinicians can provide important insights and have a major role in research, he made many contributions to the understanding of cytomegalovirus infection including, particularly, its transmissibility through sexual contact, murine models of disease, the biology of latency, resistance to antivirals, and molecular detection for diagnostic and research uses. Everywhere he served or led, he influenced students, other trainees, patients, and peers with not only his critical thinking as a scientist and clinician, but also his decency, fairness and compassion, and his low tolerance for puffery and pretension, the latter remarkable for an accomplished academician and almost as rare then as now. He helped motivate and propel many students and trainees into successful careers as physicians and scientists. As he watched medicine and science becoming a business, rather than the calling and commitment which he advocated for and lived by example, it's impossible to know whether Colin ever dreamed of again standing on a major league baseball field. In any case, to all whose lives he touched, he will always be seen as a Major League physician, scientist, and, most important, friend. He leaves his wife, Pamela Lahrs, his previous spouses, Bonnie Baskin and Patricia Jordan, daughters Teresa and Angela, son Colin Jr., and 4 grandchildren. Many fascinating aspects of his life and work, from that bomb shelter to academia, and of his generous personality are captured in his enjoyable book, “Briefings from a Doctor's Foxhole”. If desired, donations in his honor can be made to OSHU or the charity of your choice.

Under the Iron Dome

Under the Iron Dome

Fallout by Todd Strasser (review)

Reviewed by: Fallout by Todd Strasser Elizabeth Bush Strasser, Todd . Fallout. Candlewick, 2013. [272p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-5534-1 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-6722-1 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-8. Alternative history has been largely coopted by steampunk of late, but here Strasser offers a far less fanciful take on the recent past—a what-if reconsideration of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Scott Porter's dad takes the threat of nuclear war seriously, [End Page 117] Karen Coats and under the eye of his bemused neighbors, he constructs a bomb shelter under his sons' new bedroom addition. His precaution is justified on the night the sirens blare and he and his family scramble for safety through the trapdoor in the closet floor. Nearby neighbors who know of the shelter race to claim a place, and by the time Mr. Porter manages to shut the hatch, the space and provisions planned for four people must now accommodate eleven. The ensemble drama that follows, interspersed with chapters on the lead-up to the disaster, is gut-wrenchingly credible. The water tank malfunctions; nobody grabbed a watch or a clock in the midnight evacuation, so nobody can judge elapsed time; the first aid kit is woefully inadequate to helping them care for Mrs. Porter, who suffered a severe head injury on her descent into the shelter. And of course, there's ambiguity of leadership, vacillation between crushing boredom and emotional outbursts and threats, the abandonment of modesty, and the persistent fear that survival might be more horrifying than death. This title gains its power not simply from its precise detailing of disaster, but from the nuanced treatment of the entire cast of castaways, whose personal backstories are skillfully intertwined with their current behaviors. Accessible to a range of readers, this could be a provocative classroom read as well as a natural pick for disaster fans. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Scientists share blame for public’s ignorance of science

Social scientists call for “smartening up” the process of disseminating scientific information to lay audiences.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Alternative to the Bomb Shelter: Scientology’s Emergence as a Pseudo-science During the 1950s

In the 1950s, L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology and offered it as the key to surviving nuclear fallout. Hubbard’s success in promoting his claims depended on his ability to convince some people that Scientology was a unique science with more authority to state the truth than orthodox science. These claims contributed to both Scientology’s and Hubbard’s financial well-being, but provided little to no benefit for followers and may have harmed some patients. Despite diminished fears of nuclear holocaust, Scientology continues to promote purification programs based on the radiation claims Hubbard made.

L. Ron Hubbard's Alternative to the Bomb Shelter: Scientology's Emergence as a Pseudo-science During the 1950s

Abstract:In the 1950s, L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology and offered it as the key to surviving nuclear fallout. Hubbard’s success in promoting his claims depended on his ability to convince some people that Scientology was a unique science with more authority to state the truth than orthodox science. These claims contributed to both Scientology’s and Hubbard’s financial well-being, but provided little to no benefit for followers and may have harmed some patients. Despite diminished fears of nuclear holocaust, Scientology continues to promote purification programs based on the radiation claims Hubbard made.

A tribute to Burkart Engesser

Burkart Engesser is one the most renowned specialists onCenozoic rodents and insectivores worldwide. His career aspalaeontologist started 50 years ago as he entered theNatural History Museum Basel (NMB) in 1962 to work asassistant of Johannes Hu¨rzeler. This period lasted until1968 when he decided to undertake a PhD thesis under thesupervision of Hu¨rzeler who was then head of theDepartment of Osteology at the NMB and honorary lec-turer at the University of Basel. He studied the famousMiddle Miocene locality of Anwil located in the vicinity ofBasel. Burkart then started to be interested in small animalsbecause the rich locality mainly yielded tiny teeth, whichhe started to fall in love with. There is indeed an impal-pable emotion in bringing tens of millimetre-sized speciesback to life that are extracted from tons of sedimentsthrough the hard and time-consuming collecting-sieving-picking process. He became Doctor in Zoology in 1971 andhis seminal work was published in a regional Swiss journala year later. His talents as scientific illustrator becamewidely known as he illustrated the hundreds of teeth him-self, with incredible accuracy and remarkable aesthetics.Right after this, he was invited to the United States, atthe Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh as a visiting museumspecialist for 9 months. There he further developed hisfield experience in various regions and met several mam-mal specialists including the curator for vertebrates, Dr.Mary Dawson, who participates in this volume.After coming back to Basel, he had the chance to takeover the curator position at the NMB after Hu¨rzeler’sretirement until his own retirement in 2007. His Museumwork includes research, for which he dedicated a large partof his time publishing more than 50 papers in variousjournals including the most prestigious ones. His contri-butions cover the fields of systematics, phylogeny, bio-chronology or palaeoecology mostly of the Europeancontinent and the Swiss Alpine foreland basin, but severalarticles and monographs also deal with faunas of the NewWorld and Asia (see publication list below). But Museumwork is also about conservation, in which he involvedhimself in keeping a high collection standard and in greatlyenriching the collection inherited from his famous prede-cessors Ru¨timeyer, Stehlin, Schaub and Hu¨rzeler amongothers. This enlargement is barely visible since tens ofthousands of teeth of rodents and insectivores take only acouple of compactor columns in the vast collection, thetons of sediments he brought to Basel being now washedaway, probably by the Rhine River! Working in collectionsalso means that you meet colleagues from the whole world,and this is the part Burkart always preferred. Most of thecontributing authors of this volume met him in the ‘‘Bun-ker’’ of the NMB (for those who do not know the expres-sion, it is a typical Swiss bomb shelter to protect scientificgoods) and developed projects with him while discussingbiochronology or systematics. Besides research and

Mine Location Algorithm Based on Multiple Linear Regression

This paper put forward a mine location algorithm based on multiple linear regression, which using only simple RSSI value to get a higher location accuracy under long narrow and sensitive mine environment. General RSSI measurement method and its drawbacks are discussed in the paper. In order to acquire smaller location error, we filtered some abnormal RSSI data through Gaussian filter method. And we deduced regression equation according to multiple linear regression principle. Combined with training sample, we got their regression parameter. We did relevant location experiment again in the same environment---40m long and narrow bomb shelter which may imitate mine tunnel to a great extent, which shows that the total errors are limited in 3m and 75% errors are less than 2m. What’s more, it can be extended to infinite measuring range with the same set regression coefficient in similar environment.

What lies beneath

The paper looks back at the fascinating history of London's Kingsway Tunnels. There's nothing unusual about sitting in a London city office and hearing rumbling from the Central Line below. But pop through an unmarked blue door near to number 33 High Holborn, and you could find yourself in a lift heading down to a complex where Central Line trains rattle past overhead. For here, 100ft under the city streets, hides a mile-long complex of horizontal and vertical shafts, fully equipped with electricity and water supplies and covering an area of 77,000 square feet. Known as the Kingsway Tunnels, the site has served as a bomb shelter for MI6 spies, a Public Records Office storage facility, and played host to the most important telephone line in the world.