Albuquerque is a recurring but lightly drawn place in the wartime account: beyond the laboratory’s boundaries, it enters the narrative through medical care and family journeys. Its significance lies less in a portrait of the city than in the private pressures that connected it to life on the mesa.

Medical Care Beyond the Laboratory

When Richard Feynman’s wife was a patient at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, she sent him coded letters. Censors questioned Feynman about the code and asked him for its key. He replied that he did not have it, explaining that he and his wife used the messages as a game to practice his code-breaking. Albuquerque thus appears in the account through illness and separation, while the letters from the sanatorium became a point of friction with the project’s security rules.

Shopping and Family Strain

For Katherine Oppenheimer, Albuquerque was one destination for extended shopping trips away from Los Alamos. Jackie Oppenheimer recalled that Katherine might be gone for days, leaving the children with the maid; when she returned, she brought Peter an enormous present. The trips sit within a wider account of Katherine’s unhappiness and growing strain at home. In April 1945, she left for Pittsburgh with Peter, while her four-month-old daughter remained in the care of Pat Sherr. Albuquerque is not identified as the cause of these family difficulties, but its place in Katherine’s pattern of departures gives the city a small part in the narrative of her isolation and unsettled domestic life.