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Ready for a nuclear attack
The Civil Defense-marked items date from the Cold War of the 1950s and '60s and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 when Americans feared a nuclear attack was imminent. The courthouse had been built in 1955 and the basement, with fortress-like thick concrete walls, had been declared an official fall-out shelter and emergency hospital in the event of an attack. Clarke County Emergency Management Agency Director Roy Waite was looking for extra storage space when he came across the items that were apparently meant to equip an emergency hospital. The wooden cases contain gauze and bandages, stainless steel canisters, cans of ether and bottles of alcohol. Old reel-to-reel tapes are training films with titles like "The Face of Disaster." Burlap bags contain thick wool blankets. There are cases of pillows, too. There are also several boxes of "radiation detectors," bright yellow Geiger counter-looking devices for checking for nuclear radiation. Waite said the items are a time capsule of a period when people truly feared that the country could be attacked with nuclear weapons. That fear subsided for a while after the fall of Communist Russia but have rekindled since 9-11 with the rise of terrorism and the expansion of nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea. Despite any modern-day worries, the items in the basement are outdated. Waite said he would contact the Clarke County Museum to see if it wanted a few souvenirs to display. The basement, under the front part of the 1955 courthouse, also contains old county records dating to the early 1900s. Lining a shelf above the Civil Defense boxes are relics of another kind: Old metal paper ballot boxes, some with padlocks still in place.
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