Establishment of the Los Alamos Laboratory

The Establishment of the Los Alamos Laboratory turned a remote boys’ school on a New Mexico mesa into the headquarters of the atomic-bomb project. Beginning with a site visit in November 1942, the undertaking combined the construction of a laboratory, a town, and a military-controlled institution under an impossible schedule. It also forced J. Robert Oppenheimer to become a kind of leader he had never been: an organizer of hundreds, and soon thousands, of people whose work depended both on secrecy and on the exchange of ideas.

Choosing the Mesa

On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer and fellow Berkeley physicist Edwin McMillan accompanied Army officer John H. Dudley to Jemez Springs, where Dudley had identified a possible location for the new laboratory. Oppenheimer knew the region from horseback trips and had long imagined joining his love of physics to the high country of New Mexico. But the canyon floor at Jemez Springs seemed too narrow for the settlement he envisioned, offered no view of the mountains, and would be difficult to fence. When Leslie Groves arrived, he agreed that the site would not work. Oppenheimer then proposed a school on the mesa above the canyon.

The party drove about thirty miles across the Pajarito Plateau to the Los Alamos Ranch School. The 800-acre grounds included a main building known as the Big House, Fuller Lodge, a dormitory, smaller buildings, and a pond used for skating and canoeing. At 7,200 feet, the school stood near timberline. The Jemez Mountains rose to the west, while from Fuller Lodge the view extended across the Rio Grande Valley toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which Oppenheimer loved. One account recalled Groves surveying the setting and announcing, “This is the place.” Within two days, the Army began paperwork to buy the school.

The site suited two different purposes. Its mountain setting fulfilled Oppenheimer’s preference, while its isolation suited military security: there was only a winding gravel road and one telephone line into the location. The choice was therefore not simply a scenic decision. It set the physical conditions for a closed community that would have to be built almost from scratch, under wartime control, far from the urban resources on which a major laboratory ordinarily relied.

Building a Laboratory and a Town

After a quick trip to Washington, D.C., Oppenheimer returned with McMillan and Ernest Lawrence to inspect the designated Site Y. For security, the scientists used assumed names, but high-school senior Sterling Colgate recognized them from textbook photographs. Soon afterward, bulldozers and construction crews entered the school grounds. Over the next three months, they put up inexpensive barracks, crude physics and chemistry laboratories, and other facilities, all painted Army green. The buildings and landscape changed rapidly; years later, Oppenheimer acknowledged his part in the transformation by saying, “I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place.”

Oppenheimer focused on recruiting scientists and initially had little time for the administrative work of building a town. Yet he promised Hans Bethe a functioning community by the anticipated mid-March 1943 arrival of the first scientists. His plans included furnished housing for bachelors and families, electricity but no telephones, wood-burning stoves and hot-water heaters, a school, library, laundry, hospital, garbage collection, and a store run through the Army post exchange. He also envisioned movies and hikes, a cantina for beer, soft drinks, and light lunches, a mess hall for unmarried residents, and an evening café for married couples. These plans reveal the scale of the task: the project required not just scientific equipment but the ordinary services that could make an isolated settlement livable.

The laboratory’s equipment had to be assembled from institutions elsewhere. Orders included two Van de Graaff generators from Michigan, a cyclotron from Harvard, and a Cockcroft-Walton machine from the University of Illinois. These machines supported basic measurements and experiments that could transform elements. The procurement and transport of the equipment were part of the same hurried effort as housing and laboratory construction, but the gap between plans and conditions was stark. John Manley contrasted the resources available in Chicago—including a university, libraries, machinists, glass-blowers, and engineers—with Los Alamos, which initially offered little beyond the school buildings and its former students’ library.

Organization Under Pressure

The first residents arrived when Los Alamos opened in March 1943: about a hundred scientists, engineers, and support staff. Within six months the population had reached a thousand; a year after opening, 3,500 people lived on the mesa. By the summer of 1945, the outpost held at least 4,000 civilians and 2,000 uniformed men. Its 300 apartment buildings, fifty-two dormitories, and roughly 200 trailers surrounded a Technical Area of thirty-seven buildings, including laboratories, offices, a library, an auditorium, a foundry, and a plutonium purification plant. The initial construction contract had budgeted $300,000; within a year, expenditures had reached $7.5 million.

That growth placed demands on a director with almost no experience managing an institution of this kind. Oppenheimer had never supervised anything larger than graduate seminars. He initially put himself in charge of both the laboratory and theoretical physics, then appointed Bethe to lead the theoretical division when it became clear that he could not do both jobs. Manley pressed him repeatedly for a clear division of responsibilities. In March 1943, when Manley confronted him in his LeConte Hall office, Oppenheimer produced an organization chart dividing the work into experimental physics, theoretical physics, chemistry and metallurgy, and ordnance. Division chiefs would report to him. It was only a beginning, and colleagues remained troubled by the disorder surrounding construction and equipment.

Oppenheimer’s leadership developed through these pressures rather than preceding them. He listened to advice and could act decisively on it: when Bethe proposed a weekly, open-ended colloquium, Oppenheimer agreed despite Groves’s attempt to stop it. The first meeting took place on April 15, 1943, in the school’s emptied library. About forty scientists gathered as Robert Serber explained the project’s technical aims. Because security was so lax that carpenters could be heard working nearby, Oppenheimer had Manley tell Serber to use “gadget” instead of “bomb.” The meeting made the project’s central tension concrete: scientists needed a shared understanding of their work, even as the military sought to restrict what they could say.

Secrecy, Collaboration, and the Laboratory’s Meaning

The Army’s compartmentalization policy was increasingly difficult to sustain. As work advanced, scientists needed to discuss problems across organizational boundaries, and even Edward Teller regarded excessive secrecy as an obstacle. Ernest Lawrence, after being briefed by Groves on what he should not say in a lecture, went to the blackboard and began, “I know General Groves doesn’t want me to say this, but . . .” In practice, the restrictions became progressively looser, although the official policy remained. The laboratory’s functioning thus depended on collaboration that its formal security arrangements were meant to limit.

Surveillance formed another part of the institution’s design. Before Los Alamos opened, the Army arranged full-time technical and physical monitoring of Oppenheimer. Undercover counterintelligence officers were already assigned before his arrival; Andrew Walker served as his driver and bodyguard. Walker later confirmed that officers monitored Oppenheimer’s mail and home telephone, while his office was wiretapped. Oppenheimer, in turn, became attentive to security procedures, carefully keeping classified material on his person and complying with officers’ requests. The work and the surveillance weighed on him: in the summer of 1943 he told Robert Bacher that he was considering quitting, citing both investigations into his past and the strain of the job. Bacher replied that there was no one else who could do it, and Oppenheimer stayed.

Los Alamos was consequently more than a collection of machines and buildings. It brought military oversight, a rapidly constructed settlement, and a scientific community into one institution, where the need for guarded information coexisted with the need for discussion. The project’s later scale and its role in producing a usable atomic weapon made the early decisions about location, leadership, equipment, and information-sharing consequential well beyond the mesa. Its history also sharpened a question raised by Niels Bohr’s argument for an open world: whether the scientific cooperation needed to create atomic power could be reconciled with a system founded on secrecy.