The Wives of Los Alamos

If you have enjoyed past posts about the Manhattan Project and Oak Ridge, or if you have enjoyed either of the Oak Ridge/Manhattan Project books I've reviewed, you will probably enjoy The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit.

Los Alamos was one of the three principal sites of the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort to design and build the world's first atomic weapons. To review, Los Alamos was the site responsible for designing and building the weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, using fuels supplied by Oak Ridge and Hanford.

Although Ms Nesbit calls her book a novel, it's unlike any novel I have ever read. To me, it fell into a grey area between fiction and non-fiction. It reads more like an aggregated, collective memoir. She tells the stories of the wives who accompanied their scientist husbands to a remote mesa in New Mexico, the minutiae of living in a town under construction, war-time shortages, raising children, building community, being cut off from families and the rest of the world, and not knowing why they were there, except for "the war effort." Her voice is that of all the wives; "we wondered about..., we wore ...," etc. She tells of the aliases the families were given and the distracting answers they were given to answer questions that never should have been asked. She speaks of "the Director" and of "the General" without ever saying "Oppenheimer" or "Groves," but we know who she means and we share her secret. And at the end, as the scientists and their families deal with what they have created, say goodbye to colleagues and neighbors, and prepare to return to their universities or seek new jobs, we share some of their conflicted emotions about the experience.

When my wife and I first visited Los Alamos in the early 1970s, we had already lived in Oak Ridge for nearly four years and had heard many stories about life during the war years. Entering Los Alamos was almost like entering a slightly different Oak Ridge. The houses were of the same age, many of the same design. The greatest difference seemed to be that the deciduous trees of Oak Ridge had been replaced with pines. And the stories Nesbit tells are both the same and different from the Oak Ridge stories; it's like entering a slightly different Oak Ridge.

Y-12

The Y-12 Electromagnetic Separations Plant was one of three installations for the Manhattan Project sited in east Tennessee in 1943. Its mission was to enrich uranium in the fissionable isotope using large electromagnets to accelerate streams of uranium atoms, bending their paths in such a way as to allow atoms of slightly different weights to scatter such that they could be collected separately. (Yes, that is a gross simplification, but I'm an ecologist, not a physicist. For those with chemical backgrounds, they are actually large mass spectrometers.)

The machines that accomplished this separation were called calutrons, and were invented at the University of California by E.O. Lawrence, who received the Noble Prize in Physics in 1939. The chemical element 103 was named lawrencium in his honor, as well. Lawrence's calutrons at Y-12 were arranged into oval assemblages that were nicknamed racetracks, because of their shapes.

Because of the high demand for copper during the war, the electromagnets were instead wound with silver wire, borrowed from the U.S. Treasury. Readers may recall that in 1943 the U.S. was still on the silver standard and our currency was backed by silver reserves held by the treasury. A paper note was imprinted with the words "Silver Certificate," and a person could exchange one for the equivalent amount of silver on demand. So during WWII, our currency was backed by the calutrons at Y-12, at least in part. After the war the silver was reclaimed and returned to the treasury. Congress repealed the silver standard in 1963, and by 1968 currency could no longer be redeemed for silver.

Young women were trained to operate the calutron racetracks, but never told what their jobs actually were. They simply sat in front of panels of dials and controls and made adjustments to keep the readings within an allowable range. They were never allowed to look behind the curtain, and didn't learn what their job was about until after the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

 After the war all uranium enrichment was done by gaseous diffusion, at K-25 and its sister plants. Y-12 continued to operate with other defense missions. Now known as the Y-12 National Security Complex, it is operated by the U.S. Department of Energy through its National Nuclear Security Administration. You can learn more about Y-12 by visiting their web site here. Look at the articles written by Ray Smith, Y-12 historian. They're excellent.

All photographs used are U.S. Government photographs and are in the public domain.