As a change of pace, today we are driving north for about an hour to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory, and if time permits, Bandelier National Monument. The Laboratory, located on the top of an isolated mesa, was first established in 1943 as the home for the secret Manhattan Project, to build an atomic weapon.
Los Alamos Laboratory
Just before the site was secured by the US government, it was the location for the Los Alamos Ranch School with an enrollment of 45 boys. It was the place well-to-do parents from the East would send their sons that needed to become physically stronger and hopefully to toughen up. It was a vigorous life where they slept in unheated sleeping porches and wore shorts year-round. Each was assigned responsibilities and ranch duties including the care of an assigned horse he would use in frequent pack trips.
The school had plenty of housing for the initial 30+ scientists. In 1942, the Secretary of War, using condemnation proceedings, took over the property including 27 houses, dormitories, and other living quarters. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi were just two of the team of scientists converging here to design, develop, and test an atomic bomb. Los Alamos was one of three locations involved in the development. Oak Ridge, Tennessee was the center for uranium enrichment, and Hanford, Washington for plutonium production. In 2015 the government created a national park focused on American science, technology, and industry during World War II, with all three sites under a single park umbrella. For those collecting National Park and Monument stamps for your Passport binders, each facility’s stamp fills only one-third of the whole stamp. As a new national park, almost all of the buildings were closed for renovation and for installation of displays to tell the story. The only opportunities for photographs were various plaques and statues as you meandered through the town on a walking tour. The Laboratory buildings are scheduled to open as they are completed… but not much before next year.
The Bradbury Science Museum is the one facility that is open. The museum is a public facility established in 1953 to tell the story of the Manhattan Project. In 1993 it was moved to a new and present location in downtown Los Alamos. Its mission expanded beyond tracking the World War II atomic bomb development, to include the Laboratory’s current focus on national security, nuclear weapons stockpile oversight, as well as other fields. The must-see orientation film is excellent. One room features the key players in the development, testing, and first deployment of ‘the’ bomb, including life-size statues of Robert Oppenheimer, the chief scientist, and Brig. General Leslie Groves, the project manager. Audio tapings as well as short films, audio tapes, and photos of participants provide a sense of what it was like.
Statues of Oppenheimer and Groves
Reading the story of The Bomb
I believe the museum has done an outstanding job in presenting information and data, without judgement. Once the bomb was developed and tested in the White Sands desert, trepidation was present everywhere – the scientists, the military, the government. Many raised their flag to stop and not deploy this weapon. The main argument for using it was that it would save thousands of US soldiers’ lives by avoiding the more traditional military invasion. I believe that ultimately, the momentum created by the development cost, scientific breakthroughs, and intellectual curiosity, pushed the decision over the threshold. So, each one of us may decide for ourselves whether it was the right or wrong thing to do.
A separate room held replicas of the two bombs – Little Boy and Fat Man. Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, was based on the explosive power from the nuclear fission of Uranium-235. The Fat Man bomb, dropped on Nagasaki two days later, was a Uranium-239 implosion type weapon with a solid plutonium core. This second bomb was a much more complex design and was the type successfully tested at the Trinity site, in July 1945. Subsequent nuclear bombs designed and built by the US were all of the Uranium-239 genre.
In 2014, we took our grandsons Nicholas and Jackson to Japan for two weeks. Their choice -they decided, given all available places in the world to choose from, they wanted to go to Japan. We spent two days in Hiroshima and stood on the spot selected as the bull’s eye for Little Boy. We’ve all seen photos of ground zero, where nothing remains but one stone building. That building is still there, as a memorial. The other reminders include several disfigured, mutated trees and bushes that somehow survived the heat and radiation – a very freakish sight. Credit goes to the people of the city and nation that have transformed the area from total devastation to what is there today – it is absolutely stunning. The grounds is also the location of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which documents the atomic bombing and the atrocities inflicted by Japan on Chinese people in World War II. The overriding theme is to aim for world peace and to never again cause this type of pain. Our visit to this museum was very emotional – brought tears to our eyes – makes me wonder what is inside each of us that can inflict, and continue to inflict, such brutality on other humans. It is hard to look at photographs of people walking while their molten skin is dripping off their bones. Yet another testimony to the pathological duality that exists inside the human race.
Model of target in Hiroshima – confluence of rivers. Building on left survived.
Surviving building near ground zero in Hiroshima.
Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima
One thing that is absolutely clear in my mind…no doubts whatsoever, is that the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki was wrong! Why? It was a scientific/military experiment to observe and measure the true impact and damage of an atomic bomb. In selecting a site for this second bomb, the target city must not have been bombed or damaged by war, it was to be encircled by a combination of ocean and mountains, so as to contain the area of spread much like a crucible. Nagasaki was it! Oh, by the way, there was to be no advanced warning to the population – an explicit decision. They wanted to see, as clearly as possible, the pure effect of the bomb. They even delayed sending in aid, to have time to capture the results.
Today, the Los Alamos, both the town and the Laboratory are very large and attractive. The government believes that the team of scientists and researchers is a strategic weapon in our nation’s arsenal. It is important to keep this community in tact and effective. When viewing it from a broader perspective, it is like living in a bubble, not dissimilar to the Biosphere in Arizona. The town needs to be attractive and provide a good lifestyle – one that is desirable to the scientific staff. It also needs to have sufficient funding to provide all the leading edge facilities and tools that allow them to push the boundaries of research and knowledge. The Laboratory currently employs close to 10,000 people with an annual budget of more than two billion dollars. Since development of new nuclear weapons has all but stopped (supposedly, but secrecy continues to be the norm), the focus has shifted to monitoring and measuring nuclear progress around the world (Iran and North Korea, for example), to understand how our stockpile ages, to push the leading edge of super-computer simulations of fission and fusion events, and to design other high-explosives, nano-technology, and biofuels. I’d love to work here!
Silicon Graphics’ processors in Los Alamos research
The Navies-Stokes equations.
While the National Park is a work in progress, its staff is excellent and very enthusiastic. One ranger compiled a lot of material on the history of the Laboratory and volunteered to send it all to us via email. She also showed us a fun t-shirt – I decided I had to have it! See the photo. The graphic is the Navier-Stokes equations which describes the motion of viscous fluid substances – the core of fluid dynamics. It is used in the design of aircraft, blood flow, power stations, and much more. I still shutter when thinking of the fluid mechanics course I took. It nudged me to Electrical Engineering as my major.
For you pure mathematicians out there, it has not yet been proven that in three-dimensional solutions, that it exists, or not, and that they are smooth. A $1,000,000 prize is waiting for the answer.
The stench of our current political process to elect a new president does not appear to have penetrated this imaginary bubble. The talk is all about scientific topics and what is happening here. Well, that’s not totally the case. When we asked the clerk who sold me the t-shirt about culture….the El Norte thing, he was pleased when we asked him about his Spanish heritage. Seems that there are two cultures here: the scientific and the Spanish.
After lunch, we drove from Los Alamos, to Bandelier National Monument, which reaches from the Rio Grande River to the Valles Caldera and covers from then 50 square miles. It was named a National Monument in 1916.
Remaining foundations of Tyuonyi Pueblo.
Remains of the main kiva
While there is evidence of human presence dating back 10,000 years, the area was first settled by the Anasazis, and later by the puebloans, dating from the 11th to the 16th century. The canyon has a permanent creek and sufficient flat land to raise corn, beans, and squash. With the increased population due to migration of people from drought areas, they built villages and structures as high as three stories. Only the foundations of the large Tyuonyi pueblo and the Big Kiva remain. At its most active time, the Tyuonyi structure consisted of more than 400 rooms, accommodating more than 100 people. Most of the rooms were used for food storage. Others lived in cave-like dwellings that were scooped out of the walls of the Pajarito Plateau. Most of these caves were fronted with multistory masonry structures supported by wooden beams. In the photos below, you can see the remaining holes in the walls that supported the wood beams.
Dwellings in the cliffs.
Long House of cliff dwellings
Petroglyphs decorating a cliff dwelling.
It seems that the puebloans abandoned the area in the 16th century. That was about the time the Spanish began moving into this part of New Mexico. It was also a time of severe droughts. It is not clear why they left or where they went. Some speculate that their descendants currently live in the Cochiti and San Ildefonso pueblos, a few miles east on the Rio Grande River.
Comentários