This account of Phyllis Fisher's life at Los Alamos during the secret development of the atom bomb is highly personal--warm-hearted, humorous, and sensitive--and at the same time conscious of the wider meaning of events as they unfolded on that high, remote plateau. Her husband, Leon Fisher, was one of the young physicists who helped develop the bomb. She was a social worker, the mother of a two-year-old son. She did not known what was being developed in the secrecy and isolation of Los Alamos until just shortly before Hiroshima was destroyed. Her book, based on letters and recollections, tracers her experiences on the "hill," her difficulties with regulations, restrictions, and rumors, as well as with her husband's silence. Her beautifully written account is leavened with delightful humor, human insights, and poetic descriptions of scenes on that enchanting and terrifying mesa. It ends with her trip to Hiroshima about four decades later, where she saw for herself the terrible evidence of a cruelty men hoped they had outgrown. The book describes the plight of a young wife and mother in a world out of control. She was driven to write it out of an affection for the human race. It is an apology, a plea for peace. This book is compelling because of its rasp of the meaning of her experience--that she was part of the world's changing. The 6,000 men and women at Los Alamos changed the world in that place. There is no need to go farther back in history. The lesson for our time began in 1945 with the explosion of Alamogordo.--From Foreword by Alan Cranston.--Jacket flap

This book describes the authors some 40 years of personal experiences at Los Alamos. The town of Los Alamos and the nations premier defense nuclear institution--Los Alamos National Laboratory, serve as the background for the authors perspectives in his long professional career in science and management. Although much has been documented and written about Los Alamos, this book tells a unique and intimate personal story in a story-telling genre. This book also makes a stride in helping the readers understand the importance of science for our future well-being.

Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkeley, Cambridge, Paris, London and Chicago – and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship in the desolate military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab. They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of 'the project' that didn't exist as far as the greater world was concerned. They were constrained by the words they couldn't say out loud, the letters they couldn't send home, the freedom they didn't have. Though they were strangers, they joined together – babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up. But then 'the project' was unleashed and even bigger challenges faced the women of Los Alamos, as they struggled with the burden of their contribution towards the creation of the most destructive force in mankind's history – the atomic bomb. Contentious, gripping and intimate, The Wives of Los Alamos is a personal tale of one of the most momentous events in our history.

Although the World War II efforts to develop nuclear weapons have inspired a very large literature, it struck us as noteworthy that virtually nothing existed in the form of firsthand accounts. Now It Can Be Told, by General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project's military commander, is probably the most prominent exception, but the scientists themselves seem to have shown little interest in publishing their reminiscences. Believing that it would be not only worthwhile for posterity, but ex tremely interesting for the present generation to hear about the aspirations, fears, and activities of those who participated in this watershed of science and government collaboration, we arranged the public lecture series repre sented by this book.! We chose to focus upon Los Alamos since the project's efforts culminated there. The isolated laboratory in New Mexico was created to design and construct the first atomic bombs. More scientific brainpower was accumulated there than at any time since Isaac Newton dined alone, and the interactions with this community are of sociological interest, as the results of their work are of political import.

Recounts the experiences of the scientists, technicians, and families stationed at the site that planned and built the first atomic bomb, also known as the Manhattan Project.

A social history of New Mexico’s “Atomic City” Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An “instant city,” created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people—scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret laboratories, others drawn by jobs in support industries, and the families. How these people, as a community, faced both the fevered rush to create an atomic bomb and the intensity of the subsequent cold-war era is the focus of Jon Hunner’s fascinating narrative history. Much has been written about scientific developments at Los Alamos, but until this book little has been said about the community that fostered them. Using government records and the personal accounts of early residents, Inventing Los Alamos, traces the evolution of the town during its first fifteen years as home to a national laboratory and documents the town’s creation, the lives of the families who lived there, and the impact of this small community on the Atomic Age.

Wirth and Aldrich examine the Los Alamos Ranch School, an elite prep school for boys, ages twelve to eighteen. In existence between the two World Wars, the schoolas curriculum combined a robust outdoor life with a rigorous academic program mirroring the Progressive Era's quest for perfection.