How Los Alamos Came About

In the 1940s, around 300 babies were born with the address of P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. If that happened today, some blogger would be investigating it, but this was wartime. All the mail that came to that box was trucked further up into the desert to a secret town of several thousand people called Los Alamos. Just a few years earlier, it had been empty desert except for a residential school for cowboys, but it suddenly became the scientific center of the Manhattan Project. No one knew how long the war would last, or how long it would take to develop the atomic bomb, so Los Alamos was home for as long as it needed to be. Today, Los Alamos is a city of 12,000 people, many of whom work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. You can't keep a secret forever.

My grandfather worked at one of those secret cities, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II. My mother was seven at the time. She later became one of the inordinate number of people from that age and place to develop thyroid cancer. Mom was successfully treated, but might not have been diagnosed early enough if she hadn't been a Peace Corps volunteer.