Eric & I tour the Bradbury
The museum honors
Norris E. Bradbury,
Laboratory Director
from 1945 to 1970.
First, a bit of back story.... In 1917 the Los Alamos Ranch School was established for in this remote series of canyons in north central New Mexico to educate boys from age 12 to 18. The college prep boarding school employed Ivy League alumni to educate young men in a "coddle free" environment, far from the boys' homes.
The Los Alamos Ranch School was affiliated with the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scout uniform, with shorts, was worn all year round. Each boy enrolled in the school was a member of Boy Scout Troop 22, the first mounted troop in the country. Each student was assigned a horse. Camping and the skills learned outdoors were as important as any of the lessons learned in classrooms.
In 25 years, the Los Alamos Ranch School educated 600 boys. Among the school's graduates are authors GoreVidal and William S. Burroughs; Arthur Wood, former Sears and Roebuck President and Roy Chapin, former President of American Motors.
Everything changed on December 7, 1942. School Director A.J. Connell shared a letter from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson with teachers and students that stated that the school was to close in February 1943.
The Army moved in machinery and established the buildings that would be used for the Manhattan Project, the effort to develop the atomic bomb.
Theoretical Physicist ,Robert
Oppenheimer, was the scientific
director of Project Y at
Los Alamos.
A few photos of the many
people who made
Project Y a reality.
The Los Alamos Ranch School buildings were used to house the project's staff.
This photo, taken in 1946,
shows the buildings that
were in use during Project Y.
The Project Y team developed
"the gadget," the world's
first nuclear device.
on July 15, 1945.
The nuclear age had
begun.
Work continued on a bomb that would be used against the Japanese.
Little Boy, an enriched uranium
bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima
on August 6, 1945.
A replica of the trigger
for Fat Man ,the bomb
that was developed to
be dropped on Nagasaki.
A replica of Fat Man, the
second plutonium bomb.
Nagasaki on
August 9, 1945.
The laboratories at Los Alamos did not close at the end of World War II. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States developed new nuclear weapons The scientists and staff at Los Alamos worked on nuclear weapons development. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, the focus at Los Alamos has been to ensure the safety of the U.S. nuclear stockpile; developing technologies to decrease the threats of weapons of mass destruction. National security concerns are at the heart of ongoing research to solve problems related to energy, the environment and infrastructure.
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