Where Have You Gone, Old Los Alamos?
Where did Los Alamos go? We’re planning a trip to the Grand Canyon and surroundings this fall, and there’s large stretches of nothing between the landmarks. This is not surprising. As Sam Kinison observed: “We have deserts in America; we just don’t live in ‘em!” Deserts can certainly be pretty, but they’re not known for supporting large populations. Most of what’s out there to see, then, is natural geography, sparse but curious plant life, and the stars, which are fast becoming no more than rumor here in New Jersey.
There are exceptions, however: Hoover Dam has to be out there because that’s where the Colorado river is. Various mining towns appeared and vanished with the ore, leaving behind a few museums to the gold rush. And Los Alamos is out there precisely because it’s so far from anything else.
(Curiously, isolation was considered important primarily for security reasons, and not to protect people from radiation. Deep in the interior, it was safe from the prying eyes of spy planes. Far from outside populations, it was easy to police for nosy neighbors, and to track the residents’ movements, though Klaus Fuchs managed his work. Out in the desert, it had few distractions for a team of heavy-hitting physicists who were supposed to be working as hard as humanly possible. Irradiating people was fine; as late as the 1950s, Las Vegas was promoting itself as a site from which visitors could watch atomic bomb tests.)
So on a trip to the desert, it’s fairly easy to catch everything, and I wanted to add Los Alamos to our “to-see” list. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like there’s anything much left of historical Los Alamos; the town that grew up around the atomic bomb program just kept on building, apparently right over the prefab huts, until nothing was left. This is understandable—prefab huts are just an eyesore to the people who actually live there—but regrettable. Eileene and I really enjoyed the war rooms preserved as museums in the basement of Parliament, and a well-preserved Los Alamos could do the same, if it weren’t gone. The town’s tourism bureau places its fine schools at the top of the list of reasons to visit. What tourist wants to see somebody else’s junior high school?
Instead, we’ll be getting our history from Anasazi ruins. They may not be all that well-preserved, either, but at least there’s something there. There’s more to see of American pre-history than from one of the most significant events of our own era.