Los Alamos

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Its a fair old drive across country through Farmington and then down to the village of Cuba where one turns off into the mountains for a pretty, Alps like drive to Los Alamos. We all know what happened there during World War II. The atomic bomb was developed in great secrecy by the boffins of the time as the 'Manhattan Project'. The town didn't have a name as such, letters (censored) were just sent to a Zip code. It had the advantage of being remote and relatively inaccessible. We emerged from a pleasant off road experience in our dusty little Pontiac. Los Alamos is still a maze of technical areas spreading over many acres of hillside.

What do boffins do for entertainment? Well, if what we saw is anything to go off, old and classic cars...

	The centre of town is a pretty enough location. It's quite high above sea level, constant reminders of its role in developing 'little boy' and 'fat man' are everywhere. On the day we were there, there was a kind of fair and market all going on all around the grassy lake. We visited the Bradbury Science museum and watched a film giving a resume of the wartime activities that preceded the White Sands testing and its use against Japan shortly afterwards. I was just a baby at the time, but I find it difficult to be as positive as to its justification of use in ending the war as the somewhat sanitised film presented it. Hindsight is an exact science.


Perhaps I should just remember Los Alamos as a town full of brightly coloured cars and bright, warm sunshine. The people of Hiroshima and Nagaski will not have such a pleasant association.