by Karen Peterson
Perhaps not surprisingly for an institution that was born from a highly secret World War II weapons effort, none of these events are open to the public.
Most of this week’s lectures have to do with the weapons program at the lab, and one whole day of lectures is classified and not open to anyone without both U.S. citizenship and a security clearance.
More innocuous, you would have thought, is a lecture Monday by New Mexico State University History Department Chairman Jon Hunner about how the secret atomic bomb site, which by 1945 was home to about 5,000 people, was transformed into a real community in the decades following the end of the war.
But that lecture, too, is closed to the public. Hunner reprised his planned remarks in an interview last week; his book, “Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community” was published in 2003 and is full of fascinating detail about the first post-war decades.
The emerging Cold War – and the Soviet Union’s own successful atomic test at the end of the 1940s – was an important factor in the decision to keep Los Alamos operating, Hunner makes clear. In the few years between the end of the war and the successful testing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, the then-Atomic Energy Commission reinvented the community, investing millions of 1940s dollars in housing, schools, roads and other infrastructure.
“Once they were successful with nuclear weapons, instead of closing the lab, they kept it,” Hunner said. “But it wasn’t an attractive community – it was war time, things were thrown up, it was bad construction.”
The model for the new community was the “garden suburb,” with single-family housing, centralized shopping areas and emerald green landscaping.
That alone was incongruous, Hunner said. “In 1945, there were no suburbs in New Mexico. This was more like a suburb of Berkeley (Calif.) or Washington, D.C.”
More incongruous: in the middle of this garden suburb, and in a community where by the early 1950s fully a quarter of all residents were children under 10, radioactive waste flowed directly into some canyons where those same children spent most of their playtime. (The waste areas were finally fenced in several years after parents began complaining, according to Hunner.)
Another incongruity: “It was a socialist community,” Hunner said. “The government owned everything. If you wanted a light bulb changed, they sent someone over to do that.”
Of all the laboratories and atomic energy-related communities, including Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, Oak Ridge, in Tennessee and Hanford, in Washington, Los Alamos remained a secure, gated and government-owned and -administered community the longest, until 1957. Hunner said the Atomic Energy Commission’s decision to open up the town’s residential and business areas to the public was highly unpopular in Los Alamos at the time.
“The feeling had been that there was a need for security at Los Alamos,” he said. But by about 1956, the AEC decided it was too costly to keep the fences up around the residential community.
Among those who opposed removing the gates, he said, “there were worries about kidnapping and other stuff. But nothing like that happened.”
Plus, Hunner said, some in the town wanted to own homes, and to choose different paint colors than the ones the government offered when government contractors were sent to paint the house.
“With the opening of the town, there was a lot of freedom that hadn’t been there before,” Hunner said.
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