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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

> Clothing was available for contaminated workers including dozens of boxes of brand new Converse sneakers, c. 1968!

Why would the workers be contaminated?

Struggling to understand the purpose of this station, at the top it says coax but why all the fancy cooling and contamination protection?

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These facilities were designed to be hardened so as to survive a nuclear war. The air intakes were presumably needed to provide cooling for the communication equipment inside and decontamination was for any workers who needed to visit after the outside has all been contaminated with nuclear fallout

This facility is what's called a tandem office in the old long distance telephone network here in the US. The idea was that it formed a link in a routing chain between two end offices when a long-distance call was placed.

Cheshire, CT, also happened to be an AUTOVON site, which carried with it military and national security significance. This is why it was hardened against nuclear attack, including the air handling augmentations, decontamination shower, gamma ray detection equipment, and so on.

First lines:

> The Cheshire ATT facility is an underground complex originally built in 1966. It was an underground terminal and repeater station for the hardened analog L4 carrier cable (coax) that went from Miami to New England carrying general toll circuits and critical military communication circuits

Critical military communication circuits implies it was meant to survive a nuclear attack.

The site was built to survive a nearby nuclear attack.

You mean "couldn't they just reboot the server remotely using the terminal on their Mac after the crazed fools in the White House and the Kremlin annihilated civilization through nuclear holocaust in 1968?"

Well, all I can say is thank goodness we're not in that situation today so that people don't understand the "why"s.

Aren't we?

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