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1 It Took a Village to Build a Bomb: the People

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1 It Took a Village to Build a Bomb: the People It Took a Village to Build a Bomb: The People and their Lives in the Shadow of the Manhattan Project Becky Jager / History Before dawn on July 16, 1945 the world was irrevocably changed in the flash of an instant. Only those who planned and executed the nuclear test explosion understood the gravity of that moment, as an enormous mushroom cloud ascended over the desolate New Mexican landscape (eerily named Jornada del Muerto or Journey of the Dead). Attending scientists and engineers stood in awe of their accomplishment, the successful construction and detonation of the world’s most powerful weapon of mass destruction. While the nation slept, the race for the bomb had been won and the atomic age had arrived. Two hundred and fifty miles north of the test site, in the remote village of Los Alamos, wives of the scientists huddled together to await news of their husband’s mysterious project. Some of the women knew more than others, but most understood the objective was a definitive bomb to end the war. Several of the wives hoped to catch a glimpse of the blast from atop Sawyer Hill (an abandoned ski hill) near the laboratories where the atomic research had been conducted. The men who formed the scientific nucleus at Los Alamos were previously involved in America’s scattered atomic program, collectively called the Manhattan Engineer District. It was an honor to be chosen to join the team assembled at “Site Y,” as Los Alamos was called. The research facility was established as the nerve center of America’s nuclear development in the spring of 1943. One wife described: “There was some compensation in the fact that the mesa was a ‘celebrity land’. To the scientific community, Los Alamos stood for the same sort of thing that 1 Hollywood represented to an aspiring starlet.”1 The isolated mountain village was transformed into a clandestine atomic boomtown filled with eccentric scientists from around the globe, a continuous stream of laborers to carry out their vision, and military personnel to provide security and daily operations. The diverse community often had difficulty understanding one another, yet they managed to put aside their differences in order to complete the project. America’s commitment to a nuclear frontier, and the opportunity to build a technological community devoted to scientific research, excited the highly educated migrants who came to wartime Los Alamos. Many were steeped in American mythologies of building a utopian city upon the hill and Manifest Destiny. Their “city on the hill” was based on scientific collaboration and dedicated to ending the horrors of WWII. Ruth Marshak remembered receiving her husband’s news that the family was moving to an undisclosed location in the West. Robert Marshak was recruited to the theoretical physics division at Site Y. Ruth described feeling “akin to the pioneer women accompanying their husbands across the uncharted plains westward, alert to the danger, resigned to the fact that they journeyed, for weal or woe, into the unknown.”2 Leslie Groves, the general in charge of the site, used a similar metaphor. He recalled: “I came to know many of the old soldiers and scouts who had devoted 1Ruth Marshak was the wife of a Robert Marshak (deputy head of the theoretical physics division). She worked in the Housing office in Los Alamos during the war years. See Serber and Wilson. Standing By and Making Do: Women of Wartime Los Alamos, Los Alamos Historical Society (2008) p26. 2 Standing By and Making Do, p.16. 2 their lives to winning the West… I wondered what was left for me to do now that the West was won… Yet those of us who saw the dawn of the Atomic Age that early morning in Alamogordo will never hold such doubts again. We know that when man is willing to make the effort, he is capable of accomplishing virtually anything.”3 These twentieth century pioneers opened an atomic world and a military industrial frontier in the “The Land of Enchantment”. Like earlier pioneers, these newcomers relied on local communities to offer practical solutions for living and working in an unfamiliar landscape. Native American and Hispanic communities contributed thousands of workers who helped build and sustain Site Y. For local New Mexicans, the Manhattan Project provided new employment opportunities and infused cash into one of the poorest regions in the country. This particular area of New Mexico’s mountainous north was largely neglected by conquering Spaniards in the seventeenth century, and again by American settlers in the nineteenth century. Both groups found the landscape difficult and remote, leaving the area on the periphery of settlement.4 The Parajito Plateau had long been a place of isolation and sparse population; that seclusion attracted organizers of the Manhattan Project in the 1940’s. The harsh and arid landscape was not the only distinct New Mexican characteristic that determined conditions in wartime Los Alamos. A tradition of cultural accommodation, an evolution of New Mexico’s frontier past, was critical to wartime Los Alamos. While locals took advantage of jobs, money, and career advancements, the newcomers enjoyed the area’s ancient native 3 Leslie Groves. Now It Can Be Told, New York: Harper and Row (1962) p. 415. 4 Hal Rothman. On the Rims and Ridges: The Los Alamos Area Since 1880 (1992). 3 ruins and tri-cultural heritage (Native, Hispanic, and Anglo). The imposing landscape and cultural traditions of northern New Mexico offered a pleasant diversion from the intensity of dangerous work, work conducted in oppressive secrecy and isolation. Natives and Hispanics taught outsiders about New Mexico’s ancient indigenous past and how to survive in its challenging landscape. The diverse population of wartime Los Alamos shared facets of there own culture and partook in others according to their needs and interests. 5 Tolerance and accommodation were necessary to a successful outcome to the Manhattan Project. Two bureaucratic institutions, academic and military, were forced to tolerate the other’s customs and idiosyncrasies. The University of California at Berkeley was responsible for scientific organization and research. The military oversaw security, construction, and daily operations. Wartime anxieties required the community to delicately negotiate a variety of social tensions. Together the people of Los Alamos endured an oppressive sense of isolation, unrelenting urgency, and desperately inadequate resources. They overcame these hardships to complete the project, bring an immediate end to the war, and ensure American military supremacy. Wartime Los Alamos provides a unique case study to examine community cooperation, despite extraordinary diversity and dissention. It was a polyglot society under tremendous pressure. There were, however, a few important commonalities that held the village together. One wife described the community: there were no old people, no infirmed, no unemployed, and no poor.6 5 Jon Hunner described this New Mexican tradition of “cultural switching” in Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (2003) p. 6. 6 Eleanor Jette, Inside Box 1663 (2008), p.207. 4 Everyone had special permission and a specific reason to be there. More importantly, everyone trusted American stewardship of the mysterious research. Scientific histories of the Manhattan Project have been offered many times. Heroes have been selected, celebrated, and occasionally debunked. Unsettling consequences of nuclear technology have been continually debated in political, academic, and popular venues. This study provides a more intimate view of the people who lived and worked in wartime Los Alamos by examining the community they built, their interactions with each other, and their difficulties in coping with the complexities and legacies of their controversial war-work. The world’s most distinguished physicists were invited to Los Alamos; you had to know someone to be involved. Most of the scientific geniuses knew and respected one another’s work. They were not military men and they rejected enlistment. They did agree to live and work on a scientific reservation under military guard, in one of the most remote places in the lower 48 states. Only American citizens were eligible to reside at the site, forcing several emigrant scientists to become US citizens. These esteemed scientists demanded wives and children be allowed to join them in the cloistered community behind tall fences. Military officials relented; hoping the presence of families would defuse the anxieties of exceedingly stressful work. Families offered an emotional refuge in a fearful world during WWII and during the Cold War that followed. Larry Johnston The genius and fascinating personalities of men like Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Enrico Fermi have often been the focus of Manhattan project 5 histories, yet a mission of this magnitude required more than the extraordinary talents of a few men. In the summer of 2011, far removed from wartime Los Alamos, I sat with a frail man in his nineties as he reconciled his life and prepared for the inevitable. Larry Johnston (1918-2012) was a young man in his mid twenties when he arrived in Los Alamos with his wife and young daughter. He had not completed graduate school, but was recognized as a young man with extraordinary talent and potential. He came of age, established a career, and raised his family in the shadow of the bomb. Johnston earned his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1940. During his time at Berkeley, the physics department was a vibrant environment where giants in the field (Oppenheimer, Teller, Larwence, Kistakowski, and Alvarez) considered the wartime implications of their work. Johnston modestly recalled being outside the stellar group of physics students who clung to their favorite professor, whom they called “Oppie”. Larry remembered sitting in the back of Professor Oppenheimer’s class struggling to understand the complicated equations and theoretical discussions.
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