From Oppenheimer to Today _ Los Alamos, NM
From Oppenheimer to Today _ Los Alamos, NM
Transcript
00:00 at the Trinity site in southern New Mexico. That bomb was the brainchild of
00:05 J. Robert Oppenheimer and it was constructed here in Los Alamos, New
00:10 Mexico. Los Alamos is a city that owes its modern beginnings, for better or
00:15 worse, to the creation of one of the deadliest devices in human history.
00:19 Oppenheimer, a physics PhD and former teacher, spearheaded the effort and put the
00:24 formerly all but non-existent town on the proverbial map. Almost 80 years hence,
00:29 the town of 13,000 in the northern New Mexican desert continues to thrive.
00:34 At Los Alamos National Labs, the largest employer in both the town and the county
00:38 accounts for almost 11,000 jobs in the immediate area. It's worth noting though
00:43 that even with the modern amenities that we see here, that the history of this
00:47 town and the history of how it came about in wartime is readily apparent if
00:53 you know where to look. The history of this region of New Mexico stretches back
00:57 almost 10,000 years when Native Americans hunted in the area. The Spanish
01:01 would follow in the 1400s and the occasional homestead would even spring
01:05 up in the region for the hundred years between the Civil War and World War II.
01:09 However, as the Second World War raged in Europe, the allure of the region became
01:15 even more enticing. This time, not for homesteaders, but for the United States
01:20 government as a place to secretly build an atomic bomb. This plan, sometimes
01:25 referred to as Project Y, would become much better known by its other name, the
01:30 Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project, led in secret by men including Leslie
01:36 Groves, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, lasted from 1942 to
01:43 1946, culminating in 1945 with the testing of an atomic bomb at what would
01:49 become known as the Trinity Site just outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico on July
01:53 16th. This was followed three weeks later by what remains to this day the only use
01:58 of atomic weapons in wartime, with the bombings of Hiroshima on the 6th of
02:03 August and Nagasaki on the 9th, effectively putting an end to World War
02:07 II and securing an Allied victory. So this building behind me is the J. Robert
02:12 Oppenheimer House, which is the actual house that Oppenheimer lived in for a
02:15 lot of the time that he was here in Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project,
02:18 right here on site in this house right behind me. Here we are at the Manhattan
02:23 Project National Historical Park. I haven't seen any mushroom clouds yet but
02:26 I'm keeping an eye out. We have a nice park behind us. Let's go and let's see
02:31 what it's all about. So this here is the Manhattan Project National Historic Park.
02:35 It's a pretty quaint little place. We have a pond behind us and some trees and
02:39 the park here was obviously built to commemorate the role that the Manhattan
02:43 Project played, not only for Los Alamos but also for the state of New Mexico as
02:47 a whole. They did a really good job at making it a nice green space and a place
02:51 to be able to come and relax.
02:54 You know it's really interesting, despite the beginnings of Los Alamos, at least in
03:02 the modern day very much being within wartime and the development of the atom
03:06 bomb in the Manhattan Project, you look around a lot of this town and even with
03:09 the number of museums that allude to its past history and the presence of the
03:13 national labs that you have here, Los Alamos has really done a good job at
03:16 evolving into, by all accounts, a pretty normal, front-of-the-mill, northern
03:20 New Mexican town. One of the things you do have to remember about Los Alamos is
03:25 generally just how affluent the entire area is. The town of Los Alamos and the
03:32 county of Los Alamos are almost coterminous with one another and
03:35 largely due to the presence of the national lab, the median salary in Los
03:42 Alamos County is somewhere around $115,000 a year, which is high not only
03:50 for New Mexico but also for the U.S. as a whole. One of the other key things to
03:55 remember about Los Alamos, both the city and the county, is that largely due to
03:59 the presence of Los Alamos National Labs, that while the average of PhDs in the
04:06 country on a county-by-county basis is somewhere around about 2 to 3 percent,
04:10 Los Alamos completely blows that out of the water. In this county, almost 18
04:16 percent of the people that live here have a doctorate of some sort, which is
04:21 absolutely crazy to think about. Nestled between rivers and mesas that dot the
04:26 landscape of the desert southwest, Los Alamos is worth a visit. A trip to
04:31 understand the history of the area, take in the scenery of the region, and explore
04:35 the county is definitely recommended as you pass through central and northern
04:39 New Mexico.