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Bradbury Science Museum

By Frank Zoretich
Originally published as part of the "Cheap Thrills Adventure Club" in the Albuquerque Journal
Los Alamos -- "Attention please! Attention please! One of our units has been successfully dropped on Japan."
Broadcast over the public address system of The Secret City, that August 6, 1945, announcement was "electrifying," said Sgt. Ed Doty in a letter he sent to his parents in Ohio the day after the "unit" from Los Alamos -- an atom bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" -- destroyed Hiroshima.
"When the books are written and there will be plenty of them, my name won't be mentioned," he added.
Doty's letter is prominently displayed at the Los Alamos Historical Museum, located in the former guest house of the exclusive ranch school for boys that was taken over by the U.S. Army in 1942 as the site for the development of the world's first atom bombs.
The larger, more technology-oriented Bradbury Science Museum over at Los Alamos National Laboratory has replicas of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But this pine-shaded little museum, operated by the Los Alamos Historical Society, concentrates on the human stories of Los Alamos, as well as on the area's geological and archaeological history.
Even though the secret of Los Alamos had just exploded into world consciousness when Doty wrote his letter, he was still forbidden to describe his job.
All mail in and out of Los Alamos was censored. You couldn't even say "Los Alamos" -- the Secret City's return address was just a P.O. box in Santa Fe.
When the Manhattan Project moved into Los Alamos, it took over 8,900 acres of private land and 45,100 acres of Forest Service land. The War Department had considered sites at Gallup. Las Vegas, N.M., La Ventana and Jemez Springs before deciding on Los Alamos, a.k.a. The Hill, largely because of its isolation. (It was then a four-drive from Santa Fe.)
Now, it still is a winding, hilly 90-mile drive through Pueblo Indian country.
There are still plenty of secrets left in Los Alamos, where the lab continues weapons research. But mail censorship was lifted in December of 1945. In 1948 Los Alamos became a civilian rather than a military city. The guard gates all visitors had to pass through were removed in 1957.
In 1962, commercial and residential buildings changed from federal to private ownership.
Los Alamos with its grocery stores, schools and museums now is open public. (Except for the remaining restricted areas of the lab that still snake in and out of the city).
But no matter how much it might succeed in seeming to be normal, it will never, ever be remembered as just another city.