The Chesslers are roadtripping it in the Southwest over Memorial Day weekend. Benjamin has set our agenda, and it's a busy one. Today we transversed New Mexico from Alburquerque to Sante Fe to Los Alamos to Roswell, after unexpectedly spending the wee hours in Tempe, AZ (a 3 hour nap was all we got after our connecting flight from Phoenix to Alburqueque was delayed six hours). After a Southwest Mex lunch in Sante Fe to wake us up a little, we drove to the site of the creation of the atomic bomb. Los Alamos is a 40 minute drive from Sante Fe, isolated among mesas and canyons. Before Oppenheimer arrived, it was an agricultural town with a boarding school for rich boys from the East Coast (Los Alamos Ranch School). And then it was taken over by the Manhattan Project.
We visited the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, the Los Alamos History Museum, and peaked into the house Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty lived in on Bathtub Row (so called because all the homes on this block had bathtubs, not showers).
The catastrophic impact of the bombs dropped on Japan are lightly treated, as are mentions of the spies that infiltrated Los Alamos.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory replaced the Manhattan project, and according to its
website, "LANL performs R&D, design, maintenance, and testing in support of the nuclear weapons stockpile. LANL also performs theoretical and applied R&D in such areas as materials science, physics, environmental science, energy, and health." Unlike the absolute secrecy surrounding the original research labs in Los Alamos, you can visit the LANL, but tours are only offered three times a year.
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