Birthplace of the atomic bomb

Web posted Tuesday, November 7, 2000

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By Brandon Haddock
Staff Writer

In 1942, Los Alamos, N.M., was the location of a boys school. By 1945, it was the birthplace of the atomic bomb.

The tiny plot, a favorite retreat of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, was his personal choice for the site of a laboratory that would design and construct the world's first atomic weapon. After a visit to the area in November 1942, Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the supersecret Manhattan Pro ject, agreed, and the isolated spot became ``Project Y.''

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The U.S. Army began a rapid effort to acquire the boys school and surrounding lands; and by early 1943, the Manhattan Project owned nearly 63,000 acres of pasture and arid forest. Contractors labored to transform existing buildings - or build new structures - to house and support the laboratory's research and the men who performed it.

All the while, workers had little idea of the purpose of the facility they were constructing. According to a history published on the lab's World Wide Web site, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called the effort ``The Buck Rogers Project,'' noting that the lab's edifices bore no resemblance to the artillery range they were told they were building.

By summer 1945, any pretense of an artillery range was gone. ``Trinity,'' the world's first detonation of a nuclear weapon, had seared a remote patch of New Mexico desert with the force of 21,000 tons of TNT, and the Atomic Age had begun.

For more than four decades after, Los Alamos would be ground zero for the nation's efforts to win the Cold War's nuclear-arms race, the place where scientists designed more modern and more effective nuclear weapons.

Since the Cold War's end, the lab's missions have shifted. Although new weapons no longer are designed or built, Los Alamos still harbors the vast majority of the nation's nuclear secrets and maintains much of the nation's nuclear stockpile.

The lab also is active in efforts to reduce the spread of nuclear-weapons technology. It serves as home base for ``NEST,'' the secretive team of scientists who would respond if radioactive materials needed to build a weapon were stolen, or if the United States were faced with a nuclear threat from terrorists.

Besides their military uses, technological advances developed at Los Alamos have been applied in fields ranging from medicine to microchip production.

Reach Brandon Haddock at (706) 823-3409.

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