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"We came to this wonderful world," said Nobel Prizewinner I.I. Rabi in a speech at Los Alamos a few years ago when the alumni reconvened. Rabi's speech was double-edged. Titled "How Well We Meant," it both recalled the necessity of nuclear weapons and lamented their subsequent expansion. But in the beginning "it happened to be one of those spring days where everything was lovely. The air was clear and mild, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains were distinct and sharp, the mesa on the other side--lovely! And the ride up on the old road, somewhat hair raising but very interesting, the old bridge, and then, of course, the Indians; we certainly seemed to enter a new world, a mystic world."
Both the mystic and the real world are exhibited in the Bradbury Science Museum. It is about the size of Kawamoto's Peace Museum, and it too tells the story of an event and its consequences. Exhibits are arranged to indicate causalities. Einstein's letter to F.D.R. is located on a wall below a newspaper headline of the times: GERMANY ANNEXES AUSTRIA. There is a letter from Groves to Oppenheimer, requesting that Oppenheimer avoid flying in airplanes: "The time saved is not worth the risk." A photograph shows the July 16, 1945, Trinity test explosion at Alamogordo, looking like a glazed white coffee cup overturned on a bed of suds.
Oddest among the exhibits are two life-size, life-shape, white plaster models of Groves and Oppenheimer: the one, thick-fleshed in an oversize Army uniform, the cast accurate to the bulge in Groves' breast pocket, perhaps made by the chocolates to which he reportedly was addicted; the other skinny, stooped, in an unpressed civilian suit and floppy hat. From hats to shoes, all white, the two of them. All white, too, is a model of "Little Boy" lying on the floor--120 in. long, 28 in. in diameter, nearly 9,000 lbs.--looking like a small, friendly Moby Dick. Another striking figure in the museum is that of "Plastic Man," described as "one of the most popular of all the laboratory's residents during the 1950s." The transparent dummy was used to test levels of radiation on human beings after an atomic blast.
The main event in the museum is a film called The Town That Never Was, shown on a regular schedule in a small theater where the seats are carpeted rises. Hiroshima is never mentioned in this film, which for some reason begins with voices in prayer in church and the figure of Jesus covered with blood. Then the film proceeds to show the Chicago squash court and herky-jerky conversations among Szilard, Wigner, Edward Teller and the rest. A jalopy convertible winds up a mountain road in a scene that might have come from a Gene Autry western of the 1930s. There are sudden shots of the Statue of Liberty; sheep and golden flowers by a roadside; the Los Alamos Ranch School, which occupied the land before the lab came, a place where wealthy families sent sickly boys for toughening. The film's narrator says that "Indians willingly relinquished land for the sake of the war," and he describes the uniqueness of Los Alamos in terms of negatives: "No invalids, no idle rich, no in-laws, no unemployed, no jails, no sidewalks, no garages, no paved roads." The film ends with sailors bussing girls on the streets of New York, and references to the future of nuclear energy and "rockets to the stars."