Nuclear history preserved at Los Alamos

Deborah Baker, Associated Press

Friday, October 6, 2006

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. - As the secret community that gave birth to the atomic bomb morphed into a bustling government-lab town, many of its most historic sites remained tucked away.

Preservationists have had to go behind security fences to save remnants of the Manhattan Project they contend are as significant as George Washington's home or a Civil War battlefield. This weekend, a series of events will mark a milestone - restoration of a wooden, garage-like building where the world's first plutonium bombs were assembled.

"It doesn't look like much," said Cynthia Kelly, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Atomic Heritage Foundation, which is leading the drive to preserve key atomic-age sites, including those at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Tenn., and Hanford, Wash.

"It's what happened there; it takes you back in time," Kelly said.

The simple structure - the first Manhattan Project work site to be restored - is a reminder of the urgency with which scientists gathered in 1944 to design and assemble the first atomic weapons.

There was no futuristic laboratory or sophisticated equipment on the mesa top where the federal government took over a boys' ranch school.

"It was seat-of-the-pants. They were jury-rigging stuff with masking tape," Kelly said.

The newly restored "high bay" building was part of V Site, a collection of wooden shed-type structures that were slated for demolition as part of a cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory until preservationists jumped in. In 2000, the Cerro Grande fire swept through, destroying all but the high bay building.

McAllister Hull, at the time a 21-year-old Army sergeant, recalls working in a casting building at V Site.

His job was to supervise the crews casting the explosive lenses that would direct pressure inward to compress a plutonium core in "the gadget," as the prototype of the "Fat Man" bomb was called.

"We actually used a candy kettle . . . to melt the explosives, and then poured them into the mold to make the lenses," said Hull, a former professor of physics at Yale University and the University of New Mexico and a former UNM provost.

Anti-nuclear activist Greg Mello, who heads the Los Alamos Study Group, objects to the celebratory aura surrounding the events, saying they "don't have the tone of grief and remorse" that any commemoration of what led to the bombing of the Japanese cities should have.

"The legacy is fear, and . . . enormous national efforts devoted to weapons of mass destruction, and we're still struggling with that today," Mello said.