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Los Alamos History...
1999.03.29
I was the only passenger on the Pride of Taos van to Santa Fe. The driver asked me, "What do you do?" I said I was out of work at the moment. The guy sucked in his breath, whoosh. He said it was a tough time to be out of work. I said that I wrote computer manuals for a living, that this was a good field to be in, that I'd probably be able to find work again when I was ready.
He said, "Wow. Computers." He continued, "Computers. They're like--they're like, the ultimate."
I had no response to that. I just let it hang there in the air.
He elucidated: "Soon, I figure, we'll all--we'll all have those chips in our heads."
I said that I hoped that they'd work the bugs out of the chips before they started implanting them. We talked about some pacemaker failures brought on by misplaced magnetic waves. Conversation was an uphill struggle, though, and eventually we gave up.
He turned on the radio. It was talk radio. The first announcer was taking calls from viewers. She said that she was upset because her taxes were working out to be half of her income. I was boggled. When I'd been working, my taxes had been less than 50%, and I'd been taxed at a higher rate than most radio announcers. Then the radio took a turn for the less credible--the Rush Limbaugh show came on. I made a mental note that on my return trip to Albuquerque, I should find out about other carriers.
Outside the El Dorado hotel in downtown Santa Fe, I hopped out of the Pride of Taos van and into the Roadrunner van. The driver of this van asked me if I was Larry Harkin. "Close enough," I said, and then spent the next minute regretting my snarkiness as I assured the driver that there was no need to wait for any "Larry Harkin."
Things improved once we were on the road. The driver turned on the radio, but instead of Rush Limbaugh, there was mariachi music. I talked with the driver about road conditions. I pointed out that they were doing construction on the road, that I'd also seen construction when I'd come to Santa Fe before. He said that those were safety improvements for transporting waste from LANL to WIPP. So WIPP had been affecting my life before I'd even heard of it.
I arrived in Los Alamos, made arrangements for Roadrunner to pick me up the next day. I walked into the place I would stay. I'm not going to tell you where I stayed, because I have an illustrative anecdote to relate, but it could get someone into trouble.
In the lobby of the place where I would stay, I asked the desk clerk if there was a room available for the night. The clerk, looking down at a computer, said there was. I said I wanted the room. The clerk, still looking down, said fine. The clerk asked me if I was with the government, if I'd get the government rate. I said I wasn't with the government. The clerk looked up for the first time, seemed to see me. The clerk asked me if I was a student, if I would get the student rate. I said no. The clerk seemed non-plussed.
The clerk said that things would be easier if I were working for the government. I shrugged, said, "It's a bit late for that now." The clerk frowned with consternation, tapped away at the computer. We talked about where I was from (San Francisco), where the clerk was from (I'd better not say). We talked about what kind of a room I wanted. We talked about where the room would be. The clerk said that, to keep things simple, I would be charged the government rate--but that I mustn't tell anyone that the clerk had done this. I was somewhat non-plussed, but didn't turn down the discount.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific head of the Manhattan Project, needed a place to bring together the project's scientists. They were in scattered universities across the country. They were having trouble communicating. Technical communication isn't easy under any circumstances, and wartime secrecy was making things impossible.
He decided that the Jemez Mountains area of New Mexico would be a good place. He had a ranch in the area.
A few years before, Brian Dougherty came up with the stupid idea of moving his company, Geoworks, from the exciting land of Berkeley to Alameda, the lackluster community in which he lived. I'd heard some statistic about how many CEOs move their companies close to their residence. As a Geoworks employee who was fond of Berkeley, I didn't like this trend.
My estimation of J. Robert Oppenheimer fell a notch when I found out about his decision.
At the Los Alamos Historical Museum, I learned this and more. There was a bookstore. Within its books were all the things I'd learned and more. I bought several books published by the Los Alamos Historical Society, chuckling over my good fortune. When I got back home, I'd find out that these books were available at the library. I'd learned nothing here that wasn't available in books.
I went to the Bradbury Science Museum, a LANL PR effort.
(Close by was the office of the University of California. Back in Berkeley, there were some protestors which held up a banner on the University's front lawn each weekday from noon until one. They were protesting the University's contributions to nuclear weapons design. I'd always looked askance at these protestors. Didn't they know that the weapons research was going on at Lawrence Livermore Lab, not Lawrence Berkeley Lab? Now I found out that the University handled operations and administration at LANL. Maybe the protestors knew what they were protesting, after all. Maybe I should have figured out that they weren't flakes after the nth year I'd seen them. Oh well.)
The museum had a display about Arzamas-16, the "Soviet Los Alamos" which had housed the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF). Some Russians jokingly called the place "Los Arzamas".
LANL is helping the DOE figure out if Yucca Mountain, NV is a good place to put nuclear waste. There was no mention of WIPP. Was it not a pilot plant for Yucca Mountain? Were their duelling disposal plans? The museum was silent.
The museum had a place for displays from local groups. There had been an exhibit there, gone by the time I got there. It had been put up by the Los Alamos Study Group. It had (perhaps) given the message that the USA shouldn't have used atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That display had angered the Los Alamos Energy Group (LAEG). They'd made their own display, and when the LASG's display time expired, the LAEG put up theirs. It was up when I got there.
The LAEG's display presented reasons for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: If we hadn't dropped the bombs, the USA's planned land invasion of Japan would have claimed many American lives--and many Japanese lives, as well; Japan showed no sign of surrendering.
The LAEG display recognized no argument. As such, it wasn't very convincing. I've only done a survey study of that time, and I'm amazed at what a difficult decision it must have been. The USA didn't have material for many bombs--we'd dropped the two of them one after the other to fool the Japanese into thinking we had lots of them. If we'd held off on bombing Nagasaki to give the Japanese a chance to surrender after the shock of Hiroshima, would they have thought that we didn't have more bombs? If we hadn't held off on firebombing those four cities, would the Japanese have had such a strong war machine?
When had the decisions started becoming so hard to justify? Was it the occasion of Nagasaki's bombing? Hiroshima's? Was it the development of the atomic bomb? Was it the use of firebombs on cities?
When I was in middle school, I got into a few fights. I remember one fight in which I managed to wrestle some bully to the ground, to pin him. "Okay," he said, "Okay." He seemed like he'd had enough. So I got up off of him. Within a couple of seconds, he'd slammed my head against a piece of metal mounted on a wall and run away. I know that you have to be careful about enemies who don't know they're beaten.
I thought a bit about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'd been to those places a few years before. Hiroshima had had a good comic store; Nagasaki had reminded me of home. I thought about dropping bombs on such places. I wondered who would think of such a decision as simple. I supposed that Los Alamos must be a good place to get into arguments.
The museum had a Curta calculator; there were other old thinking machines.
Photo: 1952 Maniac I.
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