On February 5th we interviewed with Mathew Bolton, Pace university professor who won a noble peace prize as one of the members of a huge organization called ICAN. He was really nice and we learned a lot about him and what he had to share with us. One thing that interested me specifically was when…
First when we arrived at the growler, there was a tiny museum about what the growler did and just the general backstory before you went inside the growler. One thing I learned from that museum is that the growler used to go out on patrol during the cold war era and that the longest it has ever been out on sea was two and a half months, which I thought would be super depressing for the crew. And also during those two and a half months, the crew saw no sunlight because the growler was very stealthy so they were underwater for most of the time. And to put on top of all that misery, inside the growler was super skinny and claustrophobic. every single place you walk (except for the dining room and the game room) was a tiny bit wider than the average person. One thing that caught my eye especially was the bathrooms and shower rooms. The rooms were smaller than you can imagine, with little room to move your arms at all. One thing that made everything feel more claustrophobic was the bulkheads. The bulkheads were half the size of the narrow hallways so you kinda had to climb through it. Aside from all the depressing stuff about the growler, there were also some pretty cool looking things too. The coolest thing was probably where they launched the torpedoes. I got to see what the room looked like and a replica of the torpedoes. I also got to see how it worked, like how they loaded it and how the communication worked between the crew to launch the torpedoes. Another very cool thing was on top of the submarine, the nuclear warhead. It looked pretty big compared to the submarine, at least one eighth of the submarine. Luckily the crew never had to use the weapon while out on patrol. That was my experience on the USS Growler.
At the UN we saw a lot of gifts from other countries that symbolize something important. My favorite gift was a gift from Russia. It was a moon rock which i found surprising, i did not think i would be seeing a rock from the moon in the UN. The moon rock symbolizes how Russia and the united states were in a race to go to the moon, which i found kinda funny that they put it in the United states. Another cool thing i learned and saw was something related to my social justice project. It was a timeline of all the different countries testing nuclear bombs in the cold war. i learned that the united states tested the most bombs out of all the countries being 1032 bombs between 1945 and 1992. 216 of those of the tested bombs were underwater and in space.
