Los Alamos is a majestic ivory mesa artificially painted onto the national landscape by men named Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Feynman, Kistiakowsky, Szilard and Fuchs. "At great expense, we have gathered on this mesa the largest collection of crackpots ever seen," General Leslie R. Groves told his assembled officers at the remote outpost in the New Mexico wilderness during the darkest days of World War II. "And it's your job to keep them happy."
Happy or not, the crackpots soon unleashed the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, the atomic bomb. Ever since, Los Alamos, like Bethlehem in Judea, has been a place difficult to visit in a neutral frame of mind. Los Alamos is part rich, overachieving exurb beset by worldly goods and ills familiar all over the U.S., but raised to the nth power; part lonely company town. But, above all, it is an intellectual hothouse not quite like any other.
The social fallout hangs heavy in the mountain air. A rock group came to play at the high school a few years back and was threatened with nonpayment if its members dared live up to their reputation for dropping acid. Yet even the performers were aghast at the drugs being passed around by the local students. The usual tales of suburban wife swapping, alcoholism, mental illness, divorce and suicide seem intensified by isolation. Laura Fermi, widow of Physicist Enrico Fermi, once described the genesis of the town's problems: "We were too many of a kind, too close to one another, too unavoidable even during relaxation hours."
J. Robert Oppenheimer suggested the mesa between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains as the site for "Project Y" because it was one of his favorite places to hike. When the Army came in 1943 to build the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and develop the bomb, the only real homes were the vacated faculty houses of the exclusive Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. Their most prized features were bathtubs. The lowly had to rough it in barracks-like apartments on "Gold Street" or in the clanging metal "Denver steels" hastily built with shower stalls only. Bachelor Klaus Fuchs was the favorite baby sitter. The Fermis won everyone's heart by living down with the showers. That did not keep the bathtub from becoming a status symbol and houses from being assigned by prestige points. To this day, "Bathtub Row" is to Los Alamos what Sutton Place is to Manhattan or Nob Hill to San Francisco.
Residents claim Los Alamos has the same joys and vicissitudes as any other smallish town. Among the obvious joys are splendid skiing, fishing, riding just minutes away. But to an outside visitor Los Alamos seems uneasy, an unnatural civic transplant of 19,500 souls, where a man is known, or unknown, by the sensitized badge he wears. Directly or indirectly, the Los Alamos Scientific Lab still employs everybody in town.