Word: los
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Robert Oppenheimer suggested the mesa between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains as the site for "Project Y" because it was one of his favorite places to hike. When the Army came in 1943 to build the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and develop the bomb, the only real homes were the vacated faculty houses of the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. Their most prized features were bathtubs. The lowly had to rough it in barracks-like apartments on "Gold Street" or in the clanging metal "Denver steels" hastily built with shower stalls only. Bachelor Klaus Fuchs...
Residents claim Los Alamos has the same joys and vicissitudes as any other smallish town. Among the obvious joys are splendid skiing, fishing, riding just minutes away. But to an outside visitor Los Alamos seems uneasy, an unnatural civic transplant of 19,500 souls, where a man is known, or unknown, by the sensitized badge he wears. Directly or indirectly, the Los Alamos Scientific Lab still employs everybody in town...
...heart of MIRV warheads in Minuteman missiles. The new Trident missile will carry a nuclear warhead designed at the Lab. Theoreticians and physicists specializing in thermodynamics are drilling holes into nearby sites to reach "hot rocks" that will provide geothermal power. A special reverence is held for LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. There, one of the most powerful linear proton accelerators in existence is using a particle called a pion to treat certain cancers. Because of the technique's pinpoint accuracy, it is a possible substitute for dreaded cobalt and X-ray therapy...
Absorbed as they are with chat about cyclotrons and linear accelerators, Los Alamos scientists entertain little but avuncular contempt for people who reject the inevitability of nuclear power "until their lights go out." Says a nuclear engineer in S division: "People will believe in myths until the energy and oil crisis is a reality. There was uncertainty and near panic at Three Mile Island, but people will realize it was not all that...
...overeducated for the kind of life they lead," says Lab Staff Psychologist Frances Menlove. The sense of hush-hush urgency that still dominates the work of the Lab spills over into the social life. Gossip rains down like radioactive dust. Status symbols are precise and demanding, though in Los Alamos as in places like Cambridge, Mass., class is projected through such things as battered cars and withered clothes. Nuclear families here "are headed by a father who never had a stray thought, uncertainty or doubt," explains Father Ronald L. Bruckner, pastor of Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church. "These...