Los Alamos, born from the atom, nourished by arms

Press, 5 July 1985, Page 25

Los Alamos, born from the atom, nourished by arms

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RODNEY PINDER

NZPA-Reuter Los Alamos The atom bomb created the city of Los Alamos. It mushroomed to prosperity with the arms race and now looks to “star wars” for an assured future. Security for Los Alamos, whose national laboratory builds the United States nuclear arsenal, rests on the kind of weapons that many others feel make the world insecure. Scientists in Los Alamos dreamed up the atomic bomb 40 years ago and the hydrogen bomb in 1952. Now they have plunged energetically into developing weapons for President Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly dubbed “star wars.” “Visit exciting Los Alamos. Our business is megadeaths. We ae equal opportunity destroyers. Come look at our works everyone and despair,” declaims the town’s tiny, but vocal, peace protest movement, the Right to Live Committee. But that is a minority view. Few in Los Alamos oppose the bomb. “I think people who have problems (with dependency on weapons) would move

away,” said the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Gary Jasinek. “People working at the laboratory have developed their consciences. They do it in the cause of peace.” The laboratory’s director, Donald Kerr, says nuclear weapons have been a major force for peace since World War II as they “make the cost of war seem frighteningly high and thus discourage nations from starting wars that might lead to their use.” John Manley, aged 77, a top physicist on the Manhattan Project, looks askance at all this from his retirement home on the fringes of Los Alamos. A founder of the 20-member local peace group, he says the town has “gone nuts” on “star wars.” “It’s not too different from what I did (on the first atom bomb) but I had the war as an excuse,” he said. Even more outspoken is his former Manhattan colleague, Isidor Rabi, aged 87, a Nobel prizewinner. He was asked on television what he though of Los Alamos and its works today. “An abomination” he said. “We should have put this thing to rest 30 years ago at least. I feel sorrow that the place still exists.”

Los Alamos was carved out of the slopes of an extinct volcano, 7300 ft above sea level, in 1943 as the base for America’s topsecret Manhattan Project to develop and build the world’s first atom bomb. The cream of United States and British scientists succeeded in 28 months and gave birth to the nuclear age. Los Alamos has boomed since then. As the world’s nuclear arsenal has grown from one crude little bomb to about 50,000 megabusters, the wartime hamlet has become an affluent city comprising the largest nuclear science facility on Earth. Its population has soared from about 3000 at the end of the war to more than 18,000 — almost the same number as nuclear warheads believed to be in the United States stockpile. There is virtually no unemployment and incomes comfortably exceed the national average. The crime rate is about one-eighth that of other towns of similar size and Los Alamos claims more doctoral degrees than any other United States city.

That happy state of affairs rests mainly on the

production of nuclear weapons. Los Alamos is a company town and the company is the national laboratory. Although the laboratory works extensively on the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, theoretical science, and conventional arms, “our number one mission is the development of nuclear weapons for United States deterrence — it’s the reason we came into being and remains the raison d’etre,” said a spokesman, Steven Maaranen The laboratories dun-col-oured buildings squat over 111 square kilometres of dramatic landscape in the Jemez mountains. They contain 7000 workers, the world’s biggest scientific computer and plu-tonium-handling facility built to withstand earthquakes and tornadoes. It is all run by the University of California for the Energy Department on a Federal budget of SUS62O million ($1320.6 million) a year. Under the Reagan Administration’s arms build-up, the laboratory has added warheads for the Pershing2, Minuteman-3 and cruise missiles to United States arsenals since 1980. In 1984

work started on warheads for the Trident-2 submarinelaunched ballistic missile and a new anti-submarine nuclear depth charge. Two new nuclear weapons buildings — a detonator plant and a tritium laboratory — went up last year. Daily flights began to the nuclear test site in Nevada, which is pockmarked like a moonscape by earth collapses caused by underground blasts. “During the remainder of the decade, if nature is kind and we are clever enough, we foresee substantial progress in (“star wars”) research,” says Dr Kerr. The laboratory is experimenting with lasers that could destroy missiles in space. Specialists say that the conversion of the output of a nuclear explosion into a beam, a so-called death ray, would be the biggest leap in nuclear technology since the H-bomb.

The laboratory’s laser, Antares, hailed as the most powerful in the world, fired its first beam on target in December, 1983. It simulates a thermonuclear effect, producing pressures and temperatures as powerful as those in the Sun.