This book describes the authors some 40 years of personal experiences at Los Alamos. The town of Los Alamos and the nations premier defense nuclear institution--Los Alamos National Laboratory, serve as the background for the authors perspectives in his long professional career in science and management. Although much has been documented and written about Los Alamos, this book tells a unique and intimate personal story in a story-telling genre. This book also makes a stride in helping the readers understand the importance of science for our future well-being.
This account of Phyllis Fisher's life at Los Alamos during the secret development of the atom bomb is highly personal--warm-hearted, humorous, and sensitive--and at the same time conscious of the wider meaning of events as they unfolded on that high, remote plateau. Her husband, Leon Fisher, was one of the young physicists who helped develop the bomb. She was a social worker, the mother of a two-year-old son. She did not known what was being developed in the secrecy and isolation of Los Alamos until just shortly before Hiroshima was destroyed. Her book, based on letters and recollections, tracers her experiences on the "hill," her difficulties with regulations, restrictions, and rumors, as well as with her husband's silence. Her beautifully written account is leavened with delightful humor, human insights, and poetic descriptions of scenes on that enchanting and terrifying mesa. It ends with her trip to Hiroshima about four decades later, where she saw for herself the terrible evidence of a cruelty men hoped they had outgrown. The book describes the plight of a young wife and mother in a world out of control. She was driven to write it out of an affection for the human race. It is an apology, a plea for peace. This book is compelling because of its rasp of the meaning of her experience--that she was part of the world's changing. The 6,000 men and women at Los Alamos changed the world in that place. There is no need to go farther back in history. The lesson for our time began in 1945 with the explosion of Alamogordo.--From Foreword by Alan Cranston.--Jacket flap
Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago – and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of 'the project' that didn't exist as far as the greater world was concerned. They were constrained by the words they couldn't say out loud, the letters they couldn't send home, the freedom they didn't have. Though they were strangers, they joined together – babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up. But then 'the project' was unleashed and even bigger challenges faced the women of Los Alamos, as they struggled with the burden of their contribution towards the creation of the most destructive force in mankind's history – the atomic bomb. Contentious, gripping and intimate, The Wives of Los Alamos is a personal tale of one of the most momentous events in our history.
Growing up in the shadow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) the author, Chuck Montano, was thrilled to land a job there. But he never imagined the dangerous world he was about to enter. Los Alamos: A Whistleblower's Diary is a shocking account of foul play, theft and abuse at our nation's premier nuclear R&D installation, where those who dare to question pay with their careers and, potentially, their lives. This first-of-its-kind exposae ventures past LANL's armed guards and security fences to chronicle persistent efforts to prevent hidden truths from surfacing in the wake of headline.
From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.
Wirth and Aldrich examine the Los Alamos Ranch School, an elite prep school for boys, ages twelve to eighteen. In existence between the two World Wars, the schoolas curriculum combined a robust outdoor life with a rigorous academic program mirroring the Progressive Era's quest for perfection.
This autobiography of an outstanding mathematician, dedicated to others, whose career included stints as a senior university and federal administrator, is also the story of a young man of mixed Mexican and American parentage.
This story began before I was born, when my father, Ellis P. Steinberg, and uncle Bernard Abraham worked on the secret undertaking that developed the first atomic bombs. The result is this book-part memoir, part discussions with siblings and cousins, and part interviews with a dozen others who had a parent who worked on the Project.
