Download or read book Los Alamos Experience written by Phyllis Fisher and published by Japan Publications (USA). This book was released on 1985 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book My Los Alamos Experience written by K. C. Kim and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2013-02-11 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book 109 East Palace written by Jennet Conant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.

Download or read book The Wives of Los Alamos written by TaraShea Nesbit and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Reminiscences of Los Alamos 1943 1945 written by Lawrence Badash and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Inventing Los Alamos written by Jon Hunner and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-08-04 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Nature at War written by Thomas Robertson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "World War II was the largest and most destructive conflict in human history. It was an existential struggle that pitted irreconcilable political systems and ideologies against one another across the globe in a decade of violence unlike any other. There is little doubt today that the United States had to engage in the fighting, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The conflict was, in the words of historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, "a war to be won." As the world's largest industrial power, the United States put forth a supreme effort to produce the weapons, munitions, and military formations essential to achieving victory. When the war finally ended, the finale signaled by atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, upwards of 60 million people had perished in the inferno. Of course, the human toll represented only part of the devastation; global environments also suffered greatly. The growth and devastation of the Second World War significantly changed American landscapes as well. The war created or significantly expanded a number of industries, put land to new uses, spurred urbanization, and left a legacy of pollution that would in time create a new term: Superfund site"--

Download or read book Quads Shoeboxes and Sunken Living Rooms written by Craig Martin and published by Alamos Historical Society. This book was released on 2000 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Los Alamos written by John D. Wirth and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Children of Los Alamos written by Katrina R. Mason and published by Macmillan Reference USA. This book was released on 1995 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The spoken word is an invaluable asset which strengthens human experience of the past and adds vigor to the documentation of historical accounts. This series presents major events in American history through the rich personal testimonies of those who were there. Each volume includes: -- A preface illuminating historical background and research details -- A collection of oral testimonies selected from a range of rare and hard-to-find sources -- A concluding analytical chapter -- Notes, bibliography and an index -- Illustrations

Download or read book The Green Glass Sea written by Ellen Klages and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1943, and 11-year-old Dewey Kerrigan is traveling west on a train to live with her scientist father—but no one, not her father nor the military guardians who accompany her, will tell her exactly where he is. When she reaches Los Alamos, New Mexico, she learns why: he's working on a top secret government program. Over the next few years, Dewey gets to know eminent scientists, starts tinkering with her own mechanical projects, becomes friends with a budding artist who is as much of a misfit as she is—and, all the while, has no idea how the Manhattan Project is about to change the world. This book's fresh prose and fascinating subject are like nothing you've read before.

Download or read book Raised in the Shadow of the Bomb written by Deborah Leah Steinberg and published by . This book was released on 2016-10-25 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This story began before I was born, when my father, Ellis P. Steinberg, and uncle Bernard Abraham worked on the secret undertaking that developed the first atomic bombs. The result is this book-part memoir, part discussions with siblings and cousins, and part interviews with a dozen others who had a parent who worked on the Project.

Download or read book Restricted Data written by Alex Wellerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-09 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--

Download or read book Oppenheimer written by Charles Thorpe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the Manhattan Project was synonymous with large-scale science, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67) represented the new sociocultural power of the American intellectual. Catapulted to fame as director of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer occupied a key position in the compact between science and the state that developed out of World War II. By tracing the making—and unmaking—of Oppenheimer’s wartime and postwar scientific identity, Charles Thorpe illustrates the struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture. A stylish intellectual biography, Oppenheimer maps out changes in the roles of scientists and intellectuals in twentieth-century America, ultimately revealing transformations in Oppenheimer’s persona that coincided with changing attitudes toward science in society. “This is an outstandingly well-researched book, a pleasure to read and distinguished by the high quality of its observations and judgments. It will be of special interest to scholars of modern history, but non-specialist readers will enjoy the clarity that Thorpe brings to common misunderstandings about his subject.”—Graham Farmelo, Times Higher Education Supplement “A fascinating new perspective. . . . Thorpe’s book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind.”—Catherine Westfall, Nature

Download or read book Trinity A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb written by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trinity, the debut graphic book by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm, depicts the dramatic history of the race to build and the decision to drop the first atomic bomb in World War Two—with a focus on the brilliant, enigmatic scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. "Succeeds as both a graphic primer and a philosophical meditation." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) This sweeping historical narrative traces the spark of invention from the laboratories of nineteenth-century Europe to the massive industrial and scientific efforts of the Manhattan Project, and even transports the reader into a nuclear reaction—into the splitting atoms themselves. The power of the atom was harnessed in a top-secret government compound in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a group of brilliant scientists led by the enigmatic wunderkind J. Robert Oppenheimer. Focused from the start on the monumentally difficult task of building an atomic weapon, these men and women soon began to wrestle with the moral implications of actually succeeding. When they detonated the first bomb at a test site code-named Trinity, they recognized that they had irreversibly thrust the world into a new and terrifying age. With powerful renderings of WWII's catastrophic events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fetter-Vorm unflinchingly chronicles the far-reaching political, environmental, and psychological effects of this new invention. Informative and thought-provoking, Trinity is the ideal introduction to one of the most significant events in history.

Download or read book The Plutonium Files written by Eileen Welsome and published by Delta. This book was released on 2010-10-20 with total page 724 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the vast wartime factories of the Manhattan Project began producing plutonium in quantities never before seen on earth, scientists working on the top-secret bomb-building program grew apprehensive. Fearful that plutonium might cause a cancer epidemic among workers and desperate to learn more about what it could do to the human body, the Manhattan Project's medical doctors embarked upon an experiment in which eighteen unsuspecting patients in hospital wards throughout the country were secretly injected with the cancer-causing substance. Most of these patients would go to their graves without ever knowing what had been done to them. Now, in The Plutonium Files, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eileen Welsome reveals for the first time the breadth of the extraordinary fifty-year cover-up surrounding the plutonium injections, as well as the deceitful nature of thousands of other experiments conducted on American citizens in the postwar years. Welsome's remarkable investigation spans the 1930s to the 1990s and draws upon hundreds of newly declassified documents and other primary sources to disclose this shadowy chapter in American history. She gives a voice to such innocents as Helen Hutchison, a young woman who entered a prenatal clinic in Nashville for a routine checkup and was instead given a radioactive "cocktail" to drink; Gordon Shattuck, one of several boys at a state school for the developmentally disabled in Massachusetts who was fed radioactive oatmeal for breakfast; and Maude Jacobs, a Cincinnati woman suffering from cancer and subjected to an experimental radiation treatment designed to help military planners learn how to win a nuclear war. Welsome also tells the stories of the scientists themselves, many of whom learned the ways of secrecy on the Manhattan Project. Among them are Stafford Warren, a grand figure whose bravado masked a cunning intelligence; Joseph Hamilton, who felt he was immune to the dangers of radiation only to suffer later from a fatal leukemia; and physician Louis Hempelmann, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the plan to inject humans with potentially carcinogenic doses of plutonium. Hidden discussions of fifty years past are reconstructed here, wherein trusted government officials debated the ethical and legal implications of the experiments, demolishing forever the argument that these studies took place in a less enlightened era. Powered by her groundbreaking reportage and singular narrative gifts, Eileen Welsome has created a work of profound humanity as well as major historical significance. From the Hardcover edition.

Download or read book Los Alamos Offers Participants Hands on Experience with Renewable Energy Technology written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: