Quotes About Los Alamos

During this time, the U.S. government was conducting nuclear bomb tests in nearby Los Alamos, New Mexico. Little was known about the detrimental effects of nuclear fallout in 1949. Juarez was about 200 miles from Los Alamos, and when the winds were right, fallout from the bombs was regularly carried to Juarez and El Paso, where it settled on the populace and the cattle and in the milk and water.

That I was named to head the [Theoretical] division," Bethe comments, "was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.

Los Alamos. Young Robert Oppenheimer first approached it in the summer of 1922.

Early in 1945 Oak Ridge began shipping bomb-grade U235 to Los Alamos.

Busloads of visitors from Los Alamos and beyond had begun arriving at Compañia Hill, the viewing site twenty miles northwest of Zero, at 0200. Ernest Lawrence was there, Hans Bethe, Teller, Serber, Edwin McMillan, James Chadwick come to see what his neutron was capable of and a crowd of other men, including Trinity staff no longer needed down on the plain.

Robert Oppenheimer thus acquired for Los Alamos what Leo Szilard had not been able to organize in Chicago: scientific freedom of speech. The price the new community paid, a social but more profoundly a political price, was a guarded barbed-wire fence around the town and a second guarded barbed-wire fence around the laboratory itself, emphasizing that the scientists and their families were walled off where knowledge of their work was concerned not only from the world but even from each other.

I grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which is my hometown. In Los Alamos is, for people who don't know, a nuclear lab that built the atomic bomb. The only reason the town exists is to make nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction, and that's still happening there.

One popular story had it that Los Alamos was a wartime plant that made windshield wipers for submarines. Others insisted that workers were actually assembling submarines in a factory. This theory persisted even though there was no deep water for hundreds of miles around: against all reason, people actually believed the army had cut a secret passage to float the subs down the Rio Grande.

probably the most enduring rumor about Los Alamos, no doubt prompted by Dorothy's scavenging scarce baby clothes and cribs for new mothers on the Hill, was that it was a home for pregnant WACs.

The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.

On November 1, the first hydrogen bomb—produced at Los Alamos—was exploded, as part of codeword Operation Ivy, off the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. They called the bomb Mike. It exploded with the power of twelve megatons, causing the tiny island of Elugelab, the site of the blast, to vanish from the face of the earth.

Louis Slotin, at Los Alamos in 1946.

Though "present at the creation" of this militarization of science, Oppenheimer had walked away from Los Alamos, and Einstein respected him for attempting to use his influence to put the brakes on the arms race.

Teller would pay dearly for what he had said. Later that summer, on a visit to Los Alamos, Teller spotted an old friend, Bob Christy, in the dining hall. Walking over to greet him with outstretched hand, Teller was stunned when Christy refused to shake hands and abruptly turned his back. Standing close by was a furious Rabi, who said, "I won't shake your hand, either, Edward." Stunned, Teller went back to his hotel room and packed his bags.

But I have never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives. That this was true of Los Alamos was mainly due to Oppenheimer. He was a leader.

IN THE AUTUMN of 1944, the Soviets received the first of many intelligence reports directly from Los Alamos. The spies overlooked by Army counterintelligence included Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist with British citizenship, and Ted Hall, a precociously brilliant nineteen-year-old with a Harvard B.S. in physics. Hall arrived in Los Alamos in late January 1944, while Fuchs came in August as part of the British team led by Rudolf Peierls. Fuchs

Over the next year, Fuchs passed detailed written information to the Soviets about the problems and advantages of the implosion-type bomb design over the gun method. He was unaware that the Soviets were getting confirmation of his information from another Los Alamos resident.

Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman.

In theory the World War II atomic bomb project was a problem in nuclear physics. In reality the nuclear physics had been mostly solved before the project began, and the business that occupied the scientists assembled at Los Alamos was a problem in fluid dynamics.

The ideal symbolic site indeed for the new pyramids is, as originally at Los Alamos, the desert, for that is the ultimate environment, done over and more perfectly sterilized by the machine process, which corresponds to the ideology itself.

During my participation in the Manhattan Project and subsequent research at Los Alamos, encompassing a period of fifteen years, I worked in the company of perhaps the greatest collection of scientific talent the world has ever known.

At least some of the time, the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymous Bosch; were I to follow my conscience then, it would lead me out onto the desert with Marion Faye, out to where he stood in The Deer Park looking east to Los Alamos and praying, as if for rain, that it would happen: '…let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn.

In short, the first Trinity test at Alamogordo constituted a conscious gamble by the senior scientists at Los Alamos and their immediate superiors: a gamble with the fate of every sentient being on the face of the planet and in the atmosphere and the depths of the oceans.