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Fully half of the Lab's $385 million appropriation is spent on weapons development, and the nocturnal thuds of high explosives testing tend to be reassuring rather than disruptive of sleep. Nuclear devices designed at the Lab end up as the heart of MIRV warheads in Minuteman missiles. The new Trident missile will carry a nuclear warhead designed at the Lab. Theoreticians and physicists specializing in thermodynamics are drilling holes into nearby sites to reach "hot rocks" that will provide geothermal power. A special reverence is held for LAMPF, the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. There, one of the most powerful linear proton accelerators in existence is using a particle called a pion to treat certain cancers. Because of the technique's pinpoint accuracy, it is a possible substitute for dreaded cobalt and X-ray therapy.
Absorbed as they are with chat about cyclotrons and linear accelerators, Los Alamos scientists entertain little but avuncular contempt for people who reject the inevitability of nuclear power "until their lights go out." Says a nuclear engineer in S division: "People will believe in myths until the energy and oil crisis is a reality. There was uncertainty and near panic at Three Mile Island, but people will realize it was not all that bad."
Technical excellence has been bought at a social price. The remoteness and boredom frustrate the wives who accompanied their husbands up the hill. "They're overeducated for the kind of life they lead," says Lab Staff Psychologist Frances Menlove. The sense of hush-hush urgency that still dominates the work of the Lab spills over into the social life. Gossip rains down like radioactive dust. Status symbols are precise and demanding, though in Los Alamos as in places like Cambridge, Mass., class is projected through such things as battered cars and withered clothes. Nuclear families here "are headed by a father who never had a stray thought, uncertainty or doubt," explains Father Ronald L. Bruckner, pastor of Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church. "These are self-made men who, if they had a doubt, also had a standard deviation formula to solve it."
"Once these guys become expert scientists," gripes a school administrator, "they also become instant theologians, politicians, writers and city planners." They apply highly theoretical formulas to civic problems and arrogantly demand results. At the county headquarters each winter, when snow threatens, there is a learned controversy, sometimes complete with flow charts and probability curves, over the proper way to salt the perilous roads running down into the canyons.
Sophisticated debate also rages over whether to enact a cat-leash ordinance. George Welles, editor of the tiny Los Al amos Monitor, routinely gets letters correcting spelling and punctuation errors.