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Photo: Art on Gibson Boulevard
Jana's Complexion... Nothing About Thule Base... Now I Am Become Editor, Elider of Words...
1999.03.28 SUN
The next day, I walked to the airport. I wanted to go to Los Alamos. I had sketchy information on some airporter bus lines that might go there, and figured that I'd go to the airport to fill in the gaps and hopefully do some travelling.
On the way to the airport, I looked at the Ernie Pyle Memorial Library. I was expecting some grand stone edifice, not the non-descript building which faced me. In its garden, I saw the memorial, which had a paragraph of Mr. Pyle's wartime reportage carved upon it. A much better memorial for a writer than a stone building would have been.
At the airport, after talking to some people and making some phone calls, I found out that Roadrunner Shuttle was my best bet for going to Los Alamos, perhaps my only bet. An outfit called Shuttlejack had advertised that they went to Los Alamos, but a guide told me that Shuttlejack had closed down. I thought I'd seen one of their vans outside the airport, but what did I know?
(I later learned that Shuttlejack had temporarily shut down after one of their passengers was harmed (killed?) in a crash. They'd started up again, but had been accused of numerous safety violations. By the time I left, they were in the process of shutting down permanently. I'm glad I didn't ride with them.)
I called up Roadrunner. The dispatcher said they could drive me from Albuquerque to Los Alamos, but he seemed sour on the idea. I asked him if this was one of their regular routes. He said yes, but still didn't seem happy. I asked if there was a schedule. Nope, they could take me any time. When we started to talk specifics, he told me that I should take the Pride of Taos shuttle to Santa Fe. Then I could catch Roadrunner from Santa Fe to Los Alamos.
When I'd shown up at the airport, someone had pointed out that I'd just missed the van to Santa Fe. Grr. I made arrangments to travel the next day. Now all I had to do was figure out how to spend the rest of this day.
I broke my fast at a Waffle House, the first one I'd ever experienced. It had some measure of coolness. I was able to get a seat at the counter where I could watch the cooks work. What could be a better vacation activity than watching someone else work hard? Grill cooks must work harder than anyone. Sometimes I got a closer view than I really wanted, though. The hand-washing sink was under the counter right in front of me. Any time a cook or waitress wanted to wash her hands, her face would end up inches from mine. She'd sort of look off at an angle to keep from looking right at me; I'd discover something of interest in the salt shaker. Nevertheless, when Jana the cook washed her hands, I couldn't help but notice her face. I wanted to ask her how she kept her complexion so clear when working over that greasy grill, but I restrained myself. Later, seeing how much trouble she had understanding the orders from the waitresses, I began to suspect that Jana hadn't been working that grill for long.
Photo: Art on Gibson Boulevard
I decided to go to the National Atomic Museum on Kirtland Air Force Base. I started walking East along Gibson Boulevard. When I'd seen the name "Gibson Boulevard," I'd imagined something tree-lined, with shops. Something about the word "Boulevard" made me think this. In fact, Gibson Boulevard was treeless, shadeless. I got pretty sunburned during my hour-long walk to the gate of Kirtland AFB.
At the gate, a guard ambled out to meet me. I said I was on my way to the Atomic Museum. He said that they couldn't just let me on the base on foot. I'd have to wait for a van to come pick me up. I noticed a sign in front of the gatehouse reading "Threat Condition Alpha". I thought about Yugoslavia, Iraq. Perhaps I was on vacation, but the world wasn't. I thanked the guard and went around the corner to wait for the van.
I sat under a cottonwood tree. On a nearby dirt field, tunneling rodents hunched along. Ants crawled. There are worse ways I could have spent my time. Eventually, a van pulled up, and I was on my way.
There wasn't that much of interest at the National Atomic Museum itself. I mean, there were a lot of photos, but they were photos one could see in books. There were casings from many atomic weapons, but I wasn't really that interested.
There was a lego model of the original Chicago pile.
This was my first time seeing trinitite. Trinitite is the rough glassy substance created when the blast of the Trinity atomic bomb test at what is now the White Sands Missile Range melted the desert sand. It looks kind of like dried-out mold.
I found out that Operation Ivy was the codename for the first H-Bomb test. Here I'd thought it was just a cool band name.
The museum had casings from two of the bombs involved in the Palomares "Broken Arrow" incident. In this incident, a plane accident resulted in four nuclear missiles landing around the seaside community of Palomares, Spain. Explosives in two of the missiles blew up, scattering nuclear debris about. Here were casings from the two missiles which hadn't blown up.
They didn't have anything from the Thule Base Broken Arrow. Reading reports on Thule had scared the bejeezus out of me. Thule Base is in Greenland--the phrase "bitterly cold" comes up often. Equipment for cleaning up nuclear accidents doesn't always work so well in the cold.
Workers would remove their protective clothing so that they could continue working--gear froze up; masks iced over. I wondered if I would ever be brave enough to remove my own protective gear just so that I could try to prevent poison from spreading around the globe.
The museum didn't mention Thule Base. I guess I should be glad that they mentioned Palomares. A year before, I hadn't known that there ever had been a Broken Arrow incident. I thought they'd made up the term for the movie.
Reading over their information about the Palomares incident, I noted that the Strategic Air Command's 16th Air Force had a refueling base in Spain at a place mamed Moron. That cheered me up a bit.
I learned that the Trident I missile takes star sightings to aid in navigation. Recently, the US navy had stopped requiring that all its officers learn celestial navigation. Our "smart bombs" might be learning more skills than their operators are.
I went into the museum's theater to see the propaganda/history film "Ten Seconds that Shook the World". There was one other person in the theater, a guy with a pocket protector. Obviously, I was in the right place. More people trickled in: families, foreigners, fidgeting geeks. When the movie started up, the projection system emitted sound but no picture. About a third of the audience (myself included) excitedly perked up and started offering advice. We were no help and were told to disperse until the expert could be found.
When I finally got a chance to see the film, I learned some things.
I knew that Fermi had come to the USA from Italy, fearing for the safety of his Jewish wife. I hadn't known that he'd come straight to the USA from Sweden after picking up his Nobel prize.
Here was where I found out that Szilard had written the famous "Einstein" letter, a letter which pointed out that recent atomic discoveries might point the way to a new kind of bomb, a letter which pointed out that the Germans were starting to hoard uranium, a letter to the president. (Einstein had signed the thing, but not written it; later on, he would voice regret at having signed it. Nevertheless, you'll see plenty of sources still claiming that Einstein wrote the thing. (It's not clear how much Einstein should have regretted his action--it seems that the government pretty much ignored the letter at the time.))
There was video footage of Oppenheimer's Bhagavad Gita speech. I could see a break where part of it had been edited out. I'd been hearing two versions of this speech for a while, differing only by a missing phrase. Here was a visible edit. Some scholars had quoted the edited version without mentioning that part was missing. I brooded on this for a bit. I'd have a lot of time to think about this speech over the next couple of weeks.
It was here that I found out that while the atomic bomb was being developed, four Japanese cities were spared from firebomb raids. General Groves, the army's head of the Manhattan Project, wanted some untouched cities to better gauge the effect of atomic bombs. A skeptic might wonder if Japan might have been less likely to continue fighting if these four centers of production had been bombed earlier.
After the movie, I looked at the special display to celebrate women's history month. There were some photos featuring Lise Meitner, a physicist who'd helped discover nuclear fission and also helped get out warning of the German atomic bomb effort. One photo caption dealt with a bit of uncertainty: "Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Emma or Grete Planck (twins), about 1910".
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