Los Alamos is today one of the richest cities in the United States, and one in nine of its 13,000 inhabitants is a millionaire. With its streets as wide as highways where cars stop dead as soon as they see a pedestrian on the horizon, its motels (Hampton Inn, Comfort Inn, Holiday Inn Express…), McDonald’s, high-end supermarkets, stores with good wines and Cuban cigars, banks, sweet shops, museums, post offices, gyms, boutiques, real estate agents, and beauty, massage, and acupuncture stores, it is reminiscent of the prosperous suburbs of Chicago or Los Angeles, or to those places with a pleasant climate (Carmel, Scottsdale, Palm Springs…) where white Americans go to retire.
It’s a bit of nostalgic Norman Rockwell America, where kids run around and ride their bikes on the sidewalks, and houses are left unlocked. There is hardly any crime, everything is clean and tidy, the public schools are excellent, the traffic is not annoying and the main job creator is the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the atomic bomb was created, and nuclear weapons are still being developed today (and climate change is also being researched).
But at the same time it has something mysterious and it is a divided city, like the Berlin of the cold war. You can cross by car without any problem, walk along Main Street and enter the visitor center of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which tells how a team of five thousand scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer made the nuclear bomb. But their houses and most of the scenes of that exciting story are behind “the fence”, on the grounds of the National Laboratory and the Atomic Energy Agency, and can only be visited on organized tours a few days a year.
It is a fascinating experience, a trip back in time, to when Los Alamos was a forbidden city, which officially did not exist, like those of the former Soviet Union. To develop the pump, Oppenheimer needed an isolated location, far from the sea, warm enough to work year-round, access to electricity and water, and good communications. Because he owned a ranch in New Mexico and knew the area, he recommended the purchase (or expropriation) of several ranches and an exclusive boys’ school where the writer Gore Vidal had studied, located high on the Pajarito plateau, in a semi-desert landscape of scrub, ponderosa pines, and sage bushes, between the Jémez and Sangre de Cristo mountains. The whole thing cost the Roosevelt government $440,000.
Beginning in November 1942, when the project was launched, The Hill appeared out of nowhere, looking like a military or mining camp, or even a concentration camp, full of dust, cranes and bulldozers, with long military-style barracks around a central pond, chimneys belching smoke from coal and wood, raised platforms for walking on mud when it had rained, and on the hills the houses of the elites (General Les lie Groves, in charge of the operation, Oppenheimer and the main scientists). They were known as “the row of the bathtubs”, because they were the only ones that had that luxury. In the rest, communal showers, and thank you. The water was not superfluous, and its priority use was for the experiments. The Fuller Lodge, the main structure of the old school, became the center of the community, a restaurant, a movie theater (several movies were shown a week), and the setting for dances and parties. It is part of organized tours, and its walls are adorned with black-and-white vintage photos.
Everything was secret. The residents always carried a security card with an identifying number, without their name appearing anywhere, and their every movement was monitored. Los Alamos was not on the maps, it did not exist, and all correspondence was addressed to the 1663 Post Office. The first dentist took two years to establish, and at first there was no hospital, although there was a school with sixteen teachers, a theater, several churches, and a kindergarten. The wives of the scientists worked as clerks. Dirty clothes were trucked to the laundromat in Santa Fe, the state capital, three-quarters of an hour to the south (forty miles), via a dirt road. There was only one phone line, and Indian women from the villages in the region had special passes to clean houses. Two worlds collided head-on, the military, of martial discipline, and the civilian.
Nobody made the income statement, nor had an identity card, nor a driver’s license, nor a car registration, nor a bank account or insurance policies, nor could they travel more than 160 kilometers from Los Álamos, and they had to report any chance meeting with a friend or family member. The letters were censored, to make sure that they did not include any mention of the “project” or the work being carried out, or descriptions of the surrounding landscapes, names of towns such as Córdova, Chimayo, Truchas or Cundiyo, which could help to identify the place. It did not become an open city until 1957, twelve years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the sale of parcels to individuals was allowed.
Twenty-five minutes north of Los Alamos is the city of Española, population 10,000, and the contrast could not be more brutal. Instead of scientists and millionaires, the bulk of the population are Indians and Hispanics, many of Mexican descent. And the urban landscape is not beauty centers and boutiques, but modest shops that sell dresses for quinceanera parties. It is a cruel example of the economic and structural differences in the United States, of a world of privileged people and another of people at their service, who clean their houses, pick up their garbage and take care of their gardens.
If Los Alamos is today a kind of atomic Beverly Hills, the place where the first atomic bomb exploded on July 16, 1945 is 340 kilometers to the south, in the White Sands Missile Range, in the Tularosa Basin, a much more hostile, almost lunar landscape dominated by the Jornada del Muerto desert, the Chupadera plateau, and the Sacramento and San Andrés mountains.
Oppenheimer was a native of New York, the son of a textile exporter and a painter, a brilliant, lonely, tortured, and depressive guy who had grown up in a Manhattan house with paintings by Picasso, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh, ideologically left-wing (though not necessarily communist) and who sent money to the brigadistas who fought for the Spanish Republic against fascism. He had a thirty-meter-high platform erected on which he placed the bomb, naming the site the Trinity Site, a reference to a litany by the poet John Donne about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, humanity, faith, and submission to God’s will. You can visit only two days a year, the first Saturday of April and the third of October, without reservation but presenting an identity document, and only the first 5,000 vehicles enter. Some queue all night in front of the Stallion Gate access, on State Highway 525 in New Mexico, others sleep in Alamogordo or Carrizozo, and if there is no room there even further, in Lincoln and Socorro.
It is said that that morning of July 16 dawned twice in New Mexico, the first artificially at 5:37, when the nuclear explosion produced an infernal mushroom of gamma rays that dyed the sky red and yellow –it was seen within a radius of 200 kilometers, as far as Texas–, and twelve minutes later naturally. An obelisk marks the exact spot, and part of the visit is an open-air museum with Pershing and multi-generation missiles. Volunteers sell hot dogs, coffee, soft drinks, bags of chips and chocolate bars, but no alcohol, in a kind of tent that serves as a cafeteria, where you can also buy commemorative T-shirts and – at 50 euros per gram, almost as if it were a precious stone – fragments of trinitite, the substance that formed after the detonation, when the sand of the desert dunes liquefied and then cooled. “It’s not pretty, but it’s an overwhelming experience that sums up the best and worst of humanity,” says Regina, a German tourist.
Oppenheimer and his team of scientists observed the explosion from ten kilometers away, but no warning was given to the inhabitants of the area despite the fact that the radioactive cloud had a considerable range. Even today explosions are carried out, not with nuclear weapons, but conventional ones, and a notice of twelve hours so that whoever wants to leave. Cows are considered, on the other hand, compatible with the bombs, and are not disturbed.
There are those who believe they have seen flying saucers, and those who claim that there are tons of gold buried in the surrounding mountains. Nobody has found it. The only money is in the checking accounts of the millionaires in modern Los Alamos.
