CURRENT EXPERIENCE – LOS ALAMOS | Philosophical Guidance

“A few people laughed, a few cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him he takes on his multi-armored form and says, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” – J. Robert Oppenheimer on his memory of witnessing the explosion of the test atomic bomb at Trinity.¹

I seldom go to movie theatres, but last year I could not resist seeing Oppenheimer, a film which left me with conflicted feelings lasting to this day. It would be difficult to be unimpressed by the power of scientific discovery coupled with disciplined engineering and with the geniuses of the last century, or to avoid feeling perplexed by the transient nature of modern heroism or the ethical dilemmas intrinsic to war and international politics. While I found myself unable to celebrate the watershed achievement of a practical atomic bomb knowing it initiated the nuclear age and the threat of human if not planetary annihilation, I could not help but be fascinated with the story and its permutations. It is thus no surprise that when I traveled to New Mexico last month, a trip to Los Alamos seemed mandatory.

This small, clean town about 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe located atop a mesa in the Jemez Mountains (about 7400 feet above sea level) still has restricted areas where research involving national security continues. However for the tourist there is the very accessible Manhattan Project National Monument with its compelling museum and well-maintained historical buildings including the Fuller Lodge and Oppenheimer’s modest residence. Interestingly there is an Oppenheimer Film Tour where you are guided through scenes from the film that were shot on site “where true stories depicted in the movie actually played out in history.”²

On the day we visited, there was a cheery, knowledgeable, and most helpful woman at the front desk who recommended, if I were to read only one book, not American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer on which the movie was based, but an older book called 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant.³ This 398 page work tells the same story through the eyes of the young widow, Dorothy McKibbin, who was recruited by Oppenheimer to operate the Santa Fe office through which all participants entered the top-secret military facility and which connected them to the outside world. The book is in reality a dual biography of the parallel lives Oppenheimer and McKibbin led before, during, and after the project. The final enticement was that the author is the granddaughter of Oppenheimer’s mentor, James Conant, the Harvard president who during World War II was the deputy administrator of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) which supervised the Manhattan Project.