Atomic History
A plan to save relics of the atomic age
By Scott Elder | Online Only | July 18, 2001
The bomb detonated over Hiroshima was developed in the Periscope building.
Credit: ESH-20
A dawn with two suns—one natural, one artificial—inaugurated the atomic age in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. Within a month of the successful test, two atomic bombs assembled at Los Alamos National Laboratory destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing more than 300,000 people and ending World War II.
Fifty-six years after the conclusion of the top-secret Manhattan Project, little physical evidence remains of the original laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., 30 miles northwest of Santa Fe. But historians and preservationists, believing the relics of the atomic age can teach, have mobilized to save the vestiges of those sites before time and the elements finish them off.
"There are those who say this is a reprehensible thing that was done here, but we need to remember every part of the story," says John Rhoades, director of the Bradbury Science Museum at Los Alamos. "It's a part of our history. If we let [the sites] go, future generations aren't going to have anything to interpret."
The effort to save the remnants of the Manhattan Project began in 1998, when employees at the Department of Energy learned that the sites were slated for demolition. With the support of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a federal agency that monitors government properties, the Department of Energy won a Save America's Treasures challenge grant of $700,000 from Congress in 1999. The remaining sites at Los Alamos are now being considered for National Historic Landmark designation.
Most of the buildings and structures used during the Manhattan Project were destroyed in the 1960s to accommodate the growth of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Of the 30 that remain, only six are historically significant. None of the hastily constructed sites are architecturally important.
Restoration efforts first focused on a handful of buildings far behind the fences that surround the Laboratory in the "V Site" area. At the V Site, scientists had rushed to develop the plutonium implosion-type bombs, at times working in 24-hour shifts. The July 16 test bomb, called Trinity, set off at Alamogordo, N.M., and Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki a month later, were assembled at the V Site's High Bay Building.
In May 2000, a wildfire overwhelmed Los Alamos, destroying all of the dilapidated wooden buildings except the High Bay Building and forcing a major revision of restoration plans.
Cindy Kelly, the director of the Manhattan Project Committee of the Save America's Treasures program, says that "[The fire] has actually been a good thing, because the lab was a little concerned that the V Site was in the heart of their high-explosives area, behind two security perimeters. They really didn't want the public going through it anytime soon."
Instead, restoration will now focus on a bunker at the Gun Site, an area inside the fence where the Little Boy bomb, which was detonated over Hiroshima, was developed. At the Periscope Bunker, a concrete structure built into the side of a hill, Manhattan Project scientists had experimented with the gun-type bomb design, which fired a piece of uranium from a refitted anti-aircraft gun into another to create a nuclear chain reaction. Little Boy was the first nuclear weapon used in war.
"The Gun Site is probably the one that has the most potential to have public access," says the laboratory's John Isaacson. "We could, in the future, move the security fence around it so that the Gun Site then is outside the security perimeter."
The laboratory and the Bradbury Museum hope to collaborate to develop an interpretive center at the Gun Site by 2003, to commemorate the Manhattan Project on the 60th anniversary of its inception.
The laboratory also plans to renovate a security gate house from the Manhattan Project era as well as refurbish a 200-foot-diameter concrete bowl created for testing an implosion-type bomb. The laboratory will fill the bowl with water to help sustain local elk and mule deer during the summer.
Before any of the restoration plans can begin, supporters must finish raising funds equal to the $700,000 Congressional grant.
Kelly and others organized a conference in Santa Fe this March to raise awareness about the project. Federal legislators who attended the conference, including New Mexico's U.S. senators Pete Domenici (R) and Jeff Bingaman (D), pledged to support a bill that would provide another $2.5 million to save Manhattan Project sites. "We cannot do justice to the future if we ignore the past on which the future is clearly built," Domenici said.
Rhoades fears younger generations don't appreciate the threat still posed by nuclear weapons. "The danger as we move forward is that we forget the awfulness of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he says. "And the moment you forget about that, the possibility of using atomic weapons becomes thinkable again."
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