Sheltered Life

Cut a man off from the outside world with no way of knowing what is happening, crowd him in cramped quarters with a large group, ration his food and leave him completely to his own devices. What happens? Since many civilians and military men would face such conditions in group shelters in an atomic war, the U.S. Navy decided to try them out on 96 young (average age: 18) recruits, herded them into a 25-ft. by 48-ft. unheated shelter sunk 5 ft. beneath the grounds of the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Md. Engineers figured that the men might shiver with the cold; medics thought they would often be hungry; psychologists feared that a massive fistfight might break out. But last week, as the recruits emerged after 14 days of confinement, they made it clear that their molelike life had been tolerable enough--merely a crashing bore.

Like an Old Movie. Scientists of the Naval Research Laboratory found the experiment no bore, gathered enough information to keep them busy evaluating for several months. Closed-circuit TV zeroed in on the recruits has already given, them many of the answers they want. At first the shelter seemed a weary sailor's paradise, and the men caught up on all the sack time lost at boot camp, sleeping in shifts. When fatigue gave way to restlessness, they turned to poker (played for matchsticks, since the Navy officially bans gambling). But this palled after a week, conversation was exhausted--and morale sagged. The scene was reminiscent of wartime movies in which submariners sat trapped at ocean's bottom, forlornly waiting for death or a chance to escape. Some recruits slumped at card tables, others yawned and cradled their heads in their arms. Finally, the more imaginative raised spirits by enacting skits of recruit life or by beating out the thumping rhythms of bongo numbers on drums fashioned from their survival cracker tins.

Scientists were surprised at how quickly the men's body heat raised the temperature from a chilly 50DEG to an uncomfortable 83DEG, speeded up the air blower to lower the temperature to 76DEG. Some of the men began to lose weight on a 1,500 calorie daily diet (two meals, consisting mainly of coffee, soup and peanut butter on wheat crackers), but when the ration was increased to 2,000 calories, many lost their appetite. The sailors talked mainly of girls and real food--and in the last few days mostly about food. Though only the two dozen men assigned to step through air locks into a tunnel to check radiation were permitted to shower (a decontamination precaution), the air smelled better than that on a submarine and, says Naval Research Chemist Eugene A. Ramskill, "nowhere near as bad as in a New York nightclub."

After Confinement, Liberty. The Navy intends to try tougher tests (one this summer to see how much heat men cooped up in a shelter can take) to study the physical factors of shelter life, but its volunteer guinea pigs are unlikely ever to experience the psychological stresses of real shelter life. The first test recruits were not told how long they would be confined, but they knew that they would eventually get out in good health. Aware that they were under observation, they carefully tended to squelch unsociable feelings; the Navy even let them have all the cigarettes they wanted to avoid enmity over a dwindling supply. And each man in the shelter knew that he would be given a 72-hour liberty for his trouble--a considerably different prospect than emerging into an atomic wasteland.

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