TaraShea Nesbit - The Wives of Los Alamos

IN THE NEWSPAPER, next to the story that Mrs. Giyon was robbed of the money hidden under her pillow as she slept last Friday night and an announcement that tomato juice was taken off the ration list, were tales about our own town: Their babies are born in a P.O. Box! They throw wild parties with lab alcohol! We saw our own lives from an outsider’s perspective, with embellishments meant to fascinate and horrify: wild parties, lots of babies, you know what that means! Likely due to the rush to get the stories out, there were several misspellings, even in the headlines, such as: Now the Stoories of the Hill Can Be Told .

WE ARGUED OVER what should happen next to the Hill. Some of us said, Peace research is the only way to atone . Some of us said, Nuclear research is the only way to ensure peace . And some of us said, Nothing, absolutely nothing, should happen here. We should leave those jeeps to rust .

WE THOUGHT OF each window we had once hated, breaking. We thought of the weeds growing up and consuming the barbed wire fences. We should leave as quickly as possible , the Director told us, and some of us agreed. Let each home sink deep into the mud , Katherine said. Then, when nature has consumed the buildings, let tour guides take over.

SOME OF US no longer thought our little town was an escape from a harsh modern world. Some of us no longer thought of this place as Shangri-La.

A FEW OF our husbands returned from Japan with pictures of what had happened. We sat on the gymnasium floor or on the hay bales and watched the slides projected on the screen. The images were of barely discernible bodies. Our husbands described the people they photographed as if they were not people, but specimens: Those that did not die instantly, if they were close enough to ground zero, did so within a few days. Here is a child’s arm in the rubble. Notice the effect of radiation. We saw permanent flat shadows where a man once sat on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank, waiting for his shift to begin. We saw skin bubbled up where a face once was. Survivors in the streets, thirsting for water, opened their mouths. The now radioactive rain streamed black down their necks. A man standing by a river cupped his left eyeball in his hand. Warblers had ignited in midflight miles away. A rose pattern burned out of a schoolgirl’s blouse and made a floral tattoo on her shoulder. Had the world gone mad? We went home and held our children.

WE NEVER IN a million years thought we would find ourselves talking about a governmental report as if it was book club reading. But sure enough, within a week, we were perusing Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb Under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945 , written by Henry Smyth, chairman of the physics department at Columbia, and just released to the public. We opened it up and our eyes caught on this sentence: The ultimate responsibility for our nation’s policy rests on its citizens and they can discharge such responsibilities wisely only if they are informed. We continued reading, although it was a very technical document that lacked the emotional stories some of us preferred, so we stopped, or we kept at it, because in there were our husbands, and what, exactly, they had done.

HOW COULD WE not have known? How could we not have fully known? In retrospect, there were maybe more hints than we cared to let ourselves consider: back in Chicago, our husband’s colleague told us, Don’t be afraid of becoming a widow, if your husband blows up you will, too. We remembered the excitement in 1939 surrounding the news that a chain reaction was possible—a bottle of Chianti was passed around and signed by all of the scientists involved. Did we turn away from the clues because our questions would be met with silence? Or because in some deep way we did not want to know?

OR PERHAPS WE knew this might happen all along, but we never wanted to admit it.

WE ARGUED SMYTH’S points as well as one another’s. When we read, This weapon has been created not by the devilish inspiration of some warped genius but by the arduous labor of thousands of men and women working for the safety of their country , many of us agreed and some of us thought of ourselves, of the work we did—in the Tech Area, in the home, in the community—and we thought, Well, yes, everyday men and women built this thing, but we had no idea what we were building. Like many who sacrifice something, we felt loyalty toward the outcome. We know how it can sound: how awful that we did not think of the repercussions. But we were not living in hindsight. What many of us saw, and what our husbands saw, was this: what they had been working on for three or more years had worked. It was a relief.

SOME SAID THE report shared too much about how the bombs were made, but many of us appreciated that the military had had the foresight to have so much information ready to share as soon as the bombs were used. The report ended with a call to consider the weight of the situation.

OUR HUSBANDS CROWDED and compressed metals until the close proximity created a surplus of energy, and that energy made grand explosions. From the splitting—fission—of uranium they created Little Boy, and from the separating of a new element, plutonium, they made Fat Man.

A FEW OF our husbands went to Washington to tell congressmen how the bomb they made should be handled, saying that it should be given to the United Nations. They were ignored and our husbands returned, deflated or determined, and said, The U.S. government is a bunch of idiots .

WE READ NEWSPAPER articles to one another that described the areas of large cities that would be destroyed if the U.S. were to be attacked by a nuclear bomb. We said, I’m worried for our children , and we said, I’m worried about what we’ve done , and we said, I’m worried about peace .

THERE WERE BUSHELS of letters for us now—congratulatory letters from our friends and family—sent as soon as they heard the news that we were building bombs. Letters arrived from old friends whose husbands were doing their own covert activities, too, at different locations and in different capacities—Helen’s husband Max was working on something related to that work outside of Richland, Washington, and Joan’s husband Ely was doing something in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It had not occurred to us that we weren’t the only ones in secret towns doing secret work. How silly our cryptic letters seemed now. We received cards from strangers and even one signed by the President thanking us for our contribution to the war effort. Our children took to calling the new weapon Dad’s Bomb and bragged to one another about how they knew all along what was going to happen, how they were great secret-keepers.

WE ADDED TO the nicknames for this place Lost Almost and Margaret called Los Alamos Alas instead. Some of us thought we saved half a million lives. Some of us thought we, or our husbands, were murderers, that we had helped light a fuse that would destroy the world.

A KNIFE SALESMAN appeared at our door and we thought, How did you get past the guard? A man selling silk stockings got a temporary pass. We were free to subscribe to the New York Times and have it delivered directly to our lawns each morning.

THE OFFICE OF Price Administration terminated Los Alamos’s set pricing. Fruits and vegetables were still limp, milk was still nearly sour when we got it, except now everything was nearly double the price.

A LETTER WAS sent out to us, addressed, To all the women of Los Alamos , and it requested we attend a meeting to help spread the facts about atomic bombs and dispel rumors. The meeting was led by Joan Hinton, the female scientist many of us disapproved of. We heard she had become increasingly critical of the bomb. In the gymnasium she held up what looked like a thin piece of flat glass and said, Do you know what this is? And we called out, Glass! And she said, No, it is not glass. This is what an atom bomb does to the ground . She said, We need to do something about this , and she said, We must send this glass to the mayors of every single major city in the United States , and she said, This could be all that is left of your hometown . And we nodded as expected even if we did not like Joan and we politely declined to participate in anything she wanted. Or we volunteered and wrote letters to several mayors and asked them, Do you want this to happen to your city?