…or what I did on my vacation, Part 2
I’ve always found the story of the Manhattan project fascinating – this ultra-secret project developed on an isolated plateau in New Mexico.
It was known as ‘Project Y”.
It all sounds like something out of a movie, but it was very real and it really did change the face of the world in which I grew up.
It was therefore inevitable that while on holiday in the south-west, we should turn towards Los Alamos.
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We arrived in Sante Fe and felt like we’d stepped into the set for an old John Wayne movie.
I had expected the center of the town to be like any other modern city – but it wasn’t.
It was all red mud buildings and wide, shady verandas.
It looked like nothing much had changed for a hundred years (except the inflated prices for the tourists buying Navaho pots).
Los Alamos, however, was a different story. Of the secret nuclear research facility, there is very little remaining.
I didn’t realize that “Project Y” was set up in a school for sickly – but very rich – boys. The school was supposed to toughen them up and turn them into men. The government appropriated the school and all the land around it – lowered a veil of secrecy over the place and set the scientists to work.
One of the old school buildings now houses the most fascinating museum.
The town actually has two museums. One museum is about nuclear science – which was interesting, even for a bear of little brain like myself.
But more interesting was the museum dedicated to the people of the Manhattan project – and the lives they lived hidden away from the world.
I had always imaging the project as a handful of men in white coats in a remote building somewhere – but nothing could be further from the truth. There were hundreds of people at Los Alamos – the parties were legendary.
Wives and children joined the scientists, living in temporary homes with muddy streets.
There was a school and a hospital. Babies were born there – and to this day have a post box number in Sante Fe on their birth certificate as place of birth.
That’s how secret the whole place was.
Of course, these days the whole world knows that the US National Laboratory is at Los Alamos. Everyone knows it does nuclear energy research and also reasearch into nanotechnology and supercomputing.
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But there’s still a lot of super-secret stuff there.
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I ‘accidentally’ took a wrong turn as we headed out of town and gosh – there we were at the gates of Los Alamos. There were checkpoints and everything. There was also a large and very polite gentleman in uniform who suggested that perhaps we really wanted to turn around and go back to the town – where there were interesting museums and facilities for tourists. We took the hint.
Then a funny thing happened… A couple of hours later, while just driving around looking at the spectacular scenery – and the interesting warning signs on the fences – we suddenly found ourselves once more approaching the same checkpoint… but this time from the OTHER SIDE!
I don’t quite know how that happened. Honestly I don’t. But we drove very carefully and very quickly through the checkpoint and headed back to Sante Fe. We stopped on the way to buy some books about Los Alamos. It seemed a better way to learn more about the place – without upsetting the nice man in the neat uniform.