Just outside of Santa Fe is a little town nestled in steep canyons – Los Alamos.  Before WWII it wasn’t a town at all, just some ranches and a boys school.  During WWII our country decided we needed to develop an atomic bomb, in large part because we were pretty sure Germany was developing this technology.  We had several scientists that had escaped from Germany and knew what was being developed there.

So, the little town was built in secret and scientists from all over the country and from our allies were whisked away in secret to live at Los Alamos and develop nuclear fission before Germany could do it.  Many families came with the scientists and all lived in secret – their address was a P.O. Box in Santa Fe, their mail was heavily censored, and they could not travel under their own name but instead used aliases if they had to travel for any reason.  There was a woman who ran the office in Santa Fe that managed mail, supplies, anything the folks in Los Alamos needed.

The bomb was designed and a test version was created and set off in the desert near White Sands.  It was successful, and a few weeks later Fat Man and Little Boy (the two bombs detonated over Japan) were sent out to end the war!

On a personal note, Jeff’s mother had a cousin who worked on the Manhattan Project and disappeared during the war, coming to Los Alamos.  His name was Paul Olum and he was a math genius.  Some of his papers are still used today as the basis for certain types of calculations.  Here’s his ID picture from the Manhattan Project, which we found in a museum in Los Alamos about the Manhattan Project: