The Manhattan Project had a home.
“Now I am become death,” “the destroyer of worlds” - these famous words from the Bhagavad Gita were spoken by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory director of the Manhattan Project. In 1943, P.O. Box 1663 was listed as a Santa Fe, New Mexico address, and over the next few years, about 300 babies had it listed as the place of birth on their birth certificates, as the real location was a secret. Everything sent to that P.O. Box ended up at Los Alamos, New Mexico, 33 miles from Santa Fe, also known as P.O. Box 180, Project Y, and the secret city built there was home to a community of scientists of many nations, who created the first nuclear bomb.
Albert Einstein sent a letter on August 2nd, 1939 to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, drawing from the work of physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, warning of a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, which could lead to extremely powerful bombs of a new type. After a couple of years of study as well as the American entry into World War II, in June 1942, the Army Chief of Staff established a temporary headquarters at 270 Broadway in New York City, and the Manhattan Project had begun.
The Manhattan District encompassed all these smaller districts due to its larger scope - to build an atomic weapon. Less prominent secret locations included a nuclear reactor under a University of Chicago football field, the Alabama Ordnance Works for producing heavy water, and many others. 1942 and 1943 saw the establishment of three major sites - Oak Ridge, Tennessee, sometimes called Y-12, a large plant for the enrichment of uranium and production of some plutonium; the Hanford Engineer Works in Washington state, responsible for much of the production of plutonium; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, which was needed for the creation of the bomb.
Los Alamos was atop a table land between mesas, making it easy to control entry and control any accidents, and much of it was on already federally-owned land. The only existing structure was a small school that had opened in 1935, and the owners sold, making the Manhattan Project have a home. The Secretary of War wrote to the Secretary of Agriculture about the military necessity of acquiring the remaining federally-owned lands, and the request was granted for 54,000 acres of a demolition range. Los Alamos was activated on April 1st, 1943, and quickly transformed from an outdoorsy ranch school with buildings into a community doing the most advanced research in the world. Roads were quickly developed, but the town was kept isolated and the population grew from 1500 people to 5700 by 1945, so rapidly that hutments were a common form of accommodation. Apartment buildings were also available, and these accommodations mingled next to facilities for graphite fabrication, cyclotrons, and Van de Graaff machines. In early years, Los Alamos housed the world’s finest researchers, including Dorothy McKibbin in charge of receiving new personnel, chatting with physicist Victor Weisskopf, Enrico Fermi on a hike, and Edward Teller’s ID badge, who was later called the father of the hydrogen bomb. The Medical Corps colonel wrote Leslie Groves that this intellectual group created challenges for a military operation: “The large percentage of intellectuals will require and seek more medical care than the average person.” Other challenges included one-fifth of the married women becoming pregnant in Los Alamos, making maternity wards a necessity. The past and atomic future intersected, with ice being cut from nearby ponds and stored in ice houses because electric fridges were too hard to get, and a classified ad in the Santa Fe New Mexican looking for a Bendix washer to be shipped to P.O.Box 1663 for wartime work. Cultural phenomena, as varied as they were, like the Los Alamos band, had one real purpose: building a bomb, and they needed a place to test the bomb that they built. The base camp at Trinity site was rapidly established as a headquarters for testing the first atomic bomb, and located in the Jornada del Muerto Valley, it was selected with a more extreme version of the Los Alamos criteria: flat terrain to minimize blast effects, isolated yet close enough to Los Alamos, good weather, and nearby highways like US-85 and 380. More than 200 residents settled at the camp and a 100 ton explosives test was conducted in May 1945, followed by the preparation of the Gadget nuclear device, and the test was conducted on July 16th, 1945. After this test, the Los Alamos Lament was written before the August bombing of Japan, and it celebrated the unique experience of living in P.O.Box 1663.