Abstract
Much has been written about the nuclear scientists of Los Alamos, but very little about the wives of those scientists and the secrecy that they had to live with. Novelist
Eleanor Jette’s husband came home from work one day and asked: “How’d you like to move to the southwest?” She had confidence she could, with some spy work, decode the location. Another wife went to the university library to do some research on the area and saw that the New Mexico travel books had been previously checked out by two other scientists who has recently disappeared for war work. Their new lives were part of a series of suspicions, followed by guesses.
Many women came to Los Alamos by train, without their husbands, and were instructed to get off at the Lamy station. Someone in Lamy would drive them the 30 minutes to Santa Fe, where they met Dorothy McKibben, at 109 East Palace. She gave them a map, took their fingerprints, instructed them to board a military bus, and onward they went another hour up switchbacks, before they arrived at a gate with a barbed wire fence and a Keep Out sign.
Though the town was supposed to be a secret, the black smoke rising from the coal chimneys gave it away. It was always under construction to accommodate for growth, from a few families to a few thousand. Jette described the appearance “as raw as a new scar”. When people in Santa Fe grew suspicious, or curious, Robert Oppenheimer, who brought the best minds in physics together at Los Alamos to work on the atomic bomb, asked one wife to go try to spread a rumor in Santa Fe that would throw the residents off-course. “Do you ever wonder what we are building up there?” one wife would say. And when a stranger said yes, perhaps she could say they were building a rocket ship.
Even if they had a lifetime of navigating gossip, the women found this new location, high on a mesa in New Mexico, in a town that, on paper, didn’t even exist, created new tensions. The military’s presence, with their guns, their Dobermans, and their requests that IDs be carried at all times, reminded one of the wives, Laura Fermi, of the very reason she had left Italy.
Once they had been dancers in the Chicago ballet, or doctoral students at Ivy League colleges, and now they were told to make dinners with what little wilted produce was available at the commissary and on a stove that often did not function. The initial surprise, and perhaps sense of adventure, of going to some unknown location in the west soon wore off. Where once they took baths, they were now instructed to take brief showers in stalls lined with zinc, although water shortages often prevented them from showering at all. The women were asked to work and if they refused they were accused of being disloyal to their country. Wives who had PhDs in chemistry were asked to take typing tests. Their husbands were away 12 hours a day at the lab, and when they arrived home and their wives asked: “How was your day?” these scientists could not say. The husbands could no longer turn to their wives for support. Women grew jealous of the female scientists, who were able to be their confidants. At least one woman said she could not take it any longer and went to Reno for a divorce.
Women attempted to pull pieces of information together to work out what their husbands were up to in the lab
Because their husbands could tell them nothing, and the military posters threatened them for discussing anything war-related, the women created their own sources of information. The women attempted to pull pieces of information together to work out what their husbands were up to in the lab. Husbands urged their wives to keep their speculations to themselves, but when some wives were sunbathing with their friends at Frijoles Canyon, they discussed if their husbands were building some kind of super bomb. Martha suggested a weapon that could draw its energy from the sun. Jette did not think so and shared that every time she made a guess her husband Eric hooted: “He hoots so loud it makes me think I may be right.” Husbands told their wives that their guesses were completely incorrect, but said not to tell anyone about their ideas.
And one weekend in July, Fermi recalled, “Nobody who was anybody was left in Los Alamos, wives excepted, of course”. On 15 July, a woman physicist told Fermi that she, her husband and a few others were driving to the Sandia Mountains, near Albuquerque, to camp. She said that if the wives were able to stay awake, they might see something. What that something was, Fermi did not know. At least one husband told his wife that if she stayed up late she, too, might see something. The next morning the grapevine reported that a hospital patient, who had been unable to sleep, had seen, near dawn, a strange light. Later that evening, the scientists returned, and Fermi recalls that Enrico, a bit sunburned, “went to bed without a word”. The word “Trinity” was in the air, Fermi said, and though her husband Enrico loved to drive, he announced that he no longer felt able to do so.
One husband told his wife to leave for the weekend. Such clearance was not easy to come by, one could rarely be granted permission to leave the barbed-wired, fenced-in town. To get in, they needed a security clearance, and once inside, they needed a pass to leave. But if your parent died, you might be allowed to leave. And so one wife told the military that her father was on his deathbed. But he was not dying. Her husband gave her the code phrase: “The cat cried all night when you left.” When he wrote to her – and their mail was censored – and said that phrase, she knew it was safe to return. Why, she wondered, did other husbands not do the same? But most women did not leave that weekend. The local paper reported a bright light and speculated it was an ammunitions storage facility blowing up. In actuality, what they had seen was the Trinity Test, the test before bombs were detonated in Japan, at the White Sands Missile Range, between Las Cruces and Alamogordo in New Mexico.
Above: Women and families living in Los Alamos knew little about the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb
Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory/Creative Commons
Once the bombs were detonated on civilians in Japan, the town’s secret was out, and the women’s responses were conflicted. Fermi was disturbed to learn she and her husband had contributed to building the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But her feeling was not the pervading one in town; she locked herself in the bathroom so that others would not see her tears. She recalls: “I have never lost the sense of helplessness I felt so strongly that day, August 6, 1945.” Where other wives hoped this bomb would end war, another wife Phyllis Fisher pondered how mutual support and understanding could ever be taught when people were killing one another.
Once the bombs were detonated in Japan, the town’s secret was out, and the women’s responses were conflicted
Above: Scientists at Los Alamos moved their families from around the US and Europe to be close to them
Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory/Creative Commons
Some wives thought Los Alamos had caused the war to end six months early and saved the lives of soldiers. Jette, who remained in the town after the war, felt that the name Los Alamos, if not the cause for peace, would be the cause of scorn. She says she prayed for peace after World War II, “lest the name of Los Alamos live in infamy forever”. Fisher called her time there two “very crucial and upsetting years”. Her sense of culpability can be seen in her memoir, Los Alamos Experience, which she addresses to the “Little Lady of Hiroshima”: “I wanted to tell you [little lady of Hiroshima] that, as an American woman, I grieved with you. I wanted to say, ‘I’m sorry’.”
They were years of fear heightened by mysteries and secrets. They were years, in many ways, not unlike the present.
