Bomb Shelters

Jonuz Kasni and his family live in a domed object from which inhabitants might be expected to toddle out intoning, "Take me to your leader!" What the Kasnis call home looks like an inverted concrete saucer with protruding metal loops of inscrutable function. Its front door is a narrow portal so low to the ground that even the younger children must duck to get in.

For days, Iraqi troops have been entrenched in their desert bunkers, dug in deep as U.S.-led forces pummeled them with bombs from the air. At some point, sooner or later, such treatment could have a profound effect on the minds of many of those soldiers, psychiatrists say. In World War I, when armies were frequently pinned down inside trenches for long periods under steady bombardment, many troops suffered from a condition known then as shellshock.

A German newspaper says Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is safe from U.S. air attacks in a nuclear-bomb-proof bunker built under the shattered presidential palace in Baghdad. Bild am Sonntag reported that German companies, including one based in Munich, designed the bunker, which is 60 feet under the palace, furnished it and "worked for years to build it," but none was identified by name.

Battering rams began chipping away at a historic World War II bunker near the Bolsa Chica wetlands on Tuesday, initiating the final phase of the structure's demolition to make way for thousands of new homes. Beginning at 7:45 a.m., a 14,000-pound hydraulic hammer mounted on a caterpillar began pulverizing the structure's thick concrete walls, built to withstand air raids, punching them in staccato ear-shattering bursts that exposed tangled steel reinforcements and filled the air with dust.

In the shadow war of the Persian Gulf--the battle for public sentiment--Iraq on Wednesday delivered the equivalent of a fuel-air explosive through the images of charred Iraqi women and children. The pictures--men weeping, women stricken with grief, bodies mangled after an American bombing attack--led news broadcasts from Moscow to Tel Aviv to Paris to Amman, Jordan.

A historical group marked the site of Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker with a sign bearing graphics, photos and a chronology of events in German and English. The ruins of the bunker lie beneath a parking lot, playground and adjacent apartment building in the heart of the German capital. The Berlin Underworlds Assn. unveiled the new marker. The location was not secret, but Berlin officials had been hesitant about pointing it out because they feared that it could attract neo-Nazis.

The Baghdad structure destroyed by U.S. bombs Wednesday was built as an air raid shelter for the families of Iraq's elite, American officials said Thursday, adding that among the civilians who died in it may have been officials of the ruling Baath Party, their spouses and children.

Iraq vowed "severe revenge" Thursday for the U.S. air strike that reportedly left hundreds of civilians dead in a Baghdad structure, as outrage over the attack spread to the streets of neighboring Jordan and elsewhere in the Arab world. Chanting "Death to America!" and "Saddam, Saddam, use the chemicals, Saddam!" hundreds of demonstrators splattered the wall of the U.S.

Telephone callers in Dallas said the leading newspaper there, the Morning News, has become a "tool of the Iraqis." In Philadelphia, callers accused the Inquirer of being "against the American people." In Miami, some of the callers thought the Herald "unpatriotic." The phones were ringing Thursday with anger over how at least some of the American press covered the allied bombing attack in Baghdad that Iraq says killed hundreds of civilians, including women and children.

The believed mastermind behind three sophisticated underground marijuana plantations discovered in the Antelope Valley and Arizona last year will go on trial Tuesday. Frank E. Gegax, 48, of Lancaster is scheduled to be tried in Prescott, Ariz., on federal charges that he headed an operation of subterranean marijuana farms in Lancaster and the Mojave Valley in Arizona that produced a harvest worth more than $75 million on the street. "He is it . . . the major leader," Assistant U. S. Atty.