Three ways to AmericanStudy one of the world’s most important and controversial
laboratories.
The central laboratory in the
Manhattan Project, the World War II program through which the United States
developed the first atomic bombs, was located in Los Alamos,
New Mexico for a very specific reason: J. Robert Oppenheimer
loved the area. Oppenheimer, the physicist who would become the laboratory’s
first director and the so-called “father of the atomic bomb,” had traveled to
New Mexico at the age of 18 to recover from a devastating illness and had, like
yesterday’s artists and so many other visitors (including a certain 13 year old
AmericanStudier during his family’s national park vacation) fallen in love with
the place. By 1942, when he was selected to head the Manhattan Project,
Oppenheimer owned a horse ranch near Los Alamos, and his familiarity with the
area, coupled no doubt with his sense of how conducive it would be to privacy
and secrecy, led him to recommend it as the laboratory’s site. So on one key
level, Los Alamos reflects the complex and
often contradictory personality of its first and most famous director.
The selection of Los Alamos and New Mexico for that site also engendered at
least one more deeply ironic contradiction. Oppenheimer’s love for the area was
due in no small measure to its spectacular landscapes; the Southwest is like
nothing else in America, and, as Willa Cather captures so perfectly in her
historical novel Death Comes for the
Archbishop (1927), its mesas and canyons can capture for life the heart
and soul of any visitor. Yet it was precisely that wild and open landscape that
made the area ideal for not only the Los Alamos laboratory but also its
culminating moment: the
Trinity test, the July 16th, 1945 first explosion of an atomic
bomb. Perhaps the test site near Alamagordo, in the Jornada del Muerto Valley, was
indeed uninhabited and available for such an explosion—but even if that were
the case, the denotation without question
destroyed thousands of square miles of Southwestern landscape, flora, and
fauna, and permanently affected and altered whatever was left behind. I don’t
believe the cliché that we always hurt the ones we love, but in Oppenheimer’s
case, his choice certainly damaged the place he loved.
Moreover, I’m not entirely convinced that the Trinity site was as
uninhabited as the Manhattan Project’s planners believed. In the climactic
section of her
novel Ceremony (1977), just a few pages from the
amazing conclusion about
which I have blogged before, Leslie Marmon Silko locates her protagonist
Tayo close enough to the Trinity site (in not only geography but also, as a
World War II veteran, chronology and experienc) that he can reflect on its
status as yet another theft and destruction of sacred tribal lands by the U.S.
government. To be clear, the Jornada del Muerto Valley had not belonged to Tayo’s
Laguna Pueblo people, nor any other Native American tribe, for some time,
making that theft and destruction more metaphorical and overarching than
immediate or legal. But as each of my posts this week have highlighted, the
simple fact is that Southwestern land has been contested and cohabitated for
centuries, and certainly remained that way into the era of the Trinity test.
Los Alamos, that is, is as Mexican American as its name suggests and as Native
American as all of New Mexico, making the Manhattan Project likewise emblematic
of the American project at its worst and best.
Next Southwest
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?
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