Los Alamos

Site of the laboratory that produced the first atomic bombs used during World War II and home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the primary nuclear weapons research facility in the United States.

In 1942, General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project (code name for the U.S. mission to produce an atomic bomb), was searching for a secure site for the bomb laboratory. The location needed to be safe from enemy attack, isolated because of the [Page 436]project's top-secret status, and thinly populated in the event of a nuclear accident.

Several sites in the interior western United States were considered, but it was not until J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the bomb laboratory, suggested Los Alamos, New Mexico, that the site was chosen. The site fulfilled the selection criteria, and Oppenheimer also was keen to locate the bomb production facility at Los Alamos, a secluded mesa in the hills 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, because of its natural beauty. He had enjoyed summers in Los Alamos as a youth and believed the beautiful location would help the weapons team endure the arduous challenge ahead.

In April 1943, the scientists and engineers involved in the Manhattan Project began arriving at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, as it was then called. At its peak of production, in 1945, more than 5,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, and their families lived on the site.

On July 16, 1945, the Manhattan Project achieved its wartime mission with the detonation of a plutonium bomb at the Trinity test site at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The project's other two bombs were dropped on Japan the following month—a uranium bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6 and another plutonium bomb on the city of Nagasaki on August 9.

Following the Japanese surrender on August 14 and the conclusion of World War II, the manufacture of atomic bombs continued at Los Alamos. However, after the radiation deaths of two scientists in two separate accidents at Los Alamos in 1945 and 1946, the U.S. nuclear weapons program developed new safety guidelines that were rigidly enforced.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, the renamed Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) remained a prime U.S. nuclear weapons design post, although it shared top billing in the 1950s with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

Arms-reduction treaties in the 1970s and 1990s, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War in 1991 resulted in a diminished U.S. demand for nuclear weapons production. As a result, LANL, although still the chief nuclear weapons laboratory in the United States, shifted gears to become one of the largest scientific research sites in the world.

Today, LANL does not confine itself to nuclear physics. It has sponsored research in robotics and the AIDS virus and has cooperated on astrophysics projects with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It has also studied data from U.S. spy satellite images to detect evidence of nuclear weapons testing around the world.

Among LANL's biggest challenges in the 1990s and 2000s has been its research designed to ensure the viability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because the nation's nuclear weapons are aging and, in some cases, deteriorating, scrupulous technical vigilance is necessary to guarantee that the United States does not suffer from a diminished nuclear capacity.

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