Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community - Softcover

Hunner, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806138912 ISBN 13: 9780806138916

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007

Synopsis

A social history of New Mexico’s “Atomic City”

Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An “instant city,” created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people―scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret laboratories, others drawn by jobs in support industries, and the families. How these people, as a community, faced both the fevered rush to create an atomic bomb and the intensity of the subsequent cold-war era is the focus of Jon Hunner’s fascinating narrative history.

Much has been written about scientific developments at Los Alamos, but until this book little has been said about the community that fostered them. Using government records and the personal accounts of early residents, Inventing Los Alamos, traces the evolution of the town during its first fifteen years as home to a national laboratory and documents the town’s creation, the lives of the families who lived there, and the impact of this small community on the Atomic Age.

About this title

About the Author:

Jon Hunner, Professor of History and Public History Director at New Mexico State University, is author of Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community.

From Booklist:

This is a civic and sociological account of the birthplace of the atom bomb, covering the years 1942-57. In the latter year, historian Hunner explains, security fences were removed from the residential part of Los Alamos, signifying its metamorphosis from a secret military installation where many people roughed it in tents to a normal town with a baby-boom infrastructure of new schools and comfortable, suburban-style housing. Hunner taps into the wealth of memoirs about life in Los Alamos in this period, left by both nuclear physicists and their children, but he rounds out his treatment by paying attention to the experiences of groups lower on the Los Alamos totem pole, such as guards and maids. On the civics side, Hunner tracks community organizations, structures of governance, and its business--the design and testing of nuclear weapons. The bomb's early developmental signposts as they affected both construction and local attitudes about the cold war guide Hunner's studious narrative, an ably researched supplement to general histories about the bomb. Gilbert Taylor
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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0806138912
• ISBN 13: 9780806138916
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304