Los Alamos, New Mexico, was where Robert Oppenheimer and his team of
physicists worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to design the
world's first nuclear bomb. Before the laboratory, there was little to
be found in the area, but when employees moved in, it became a
community. After the war, the development of nuclear weapons continued
at Los Alamos, but the government didn't want that to be widely known. A
1954 public relations campaign made it seem like just another town.
It
had multiple barber shops, movie theatres, and jewelers, a photography
store, pastry shop and even a florist. There was a police force and fire
department, albeit one directly subsidized by the federal Atomic Energy
Council that also had to be trained in special firefighting techniques
involving radioactive materials. There was a daily flight from Los
Alamos to Albuquerque, a library stocked with over 18,000 titles, and
living space aplenty, with the smallest one-bedroom apartments going for
$22 a month and rents for the largest units capped at $135. Residents
of Los Alamos could even listen to the radio, a luxury that wasn't
afforded them during wartime. Their local station, KRSN was presided
over by a certain Robert Porton, whose "large record collection is the
envy of many a disc jockey."
Sure, most of 12,000 citizens were
working on developing weapons of mass destruction or the family members
of someone who was, but other than that, Los Alamos was a paragon of
idyllic 50s American life.
Read about
how Los Alamos went from a brand new wartime facility to a "normal" town at Motherboard.
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