Virtual tour gives visitors behind-the-scenes glimpse of Manhattan Project
Los Alamos museum showcases five buildings in LANL’s Technical Area 18
One of the first reported nuclear fatalities in New Mexico occurred in 1946 inside a sterile white building on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s original campus that was known as the “annex” of the Manhattan Project. Louis Slotin, a Canadian physicist, was demonstrating how to bring a nuclear reaction to the brink of criticality, when the screwdriver in his hand slipped and a grapefruit-sized plutonium pit imploded, releasing a blue flash and vast amounts of radiation.
Within nine days, Slotin died at the age of 35.
More than 70 years later, the building, known as both TA-18-1 and the Slotin Building, is considered a piece of the lab’s cultural heritage. It will one day be open to the public as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
For now, a security clearance badge is required to enter the building.
It is one of several places in the Manhattan Project National Historical Park — designated by Congress in 2014 at sites inside and around Los Alamos, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Hanford Site in Washington state — that are off-limits to visitors, either because they are still being used by the U.S. Department of Energy for weapons work or because current conditions make them unsafe for the public.
The Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos opened a new exhibit Friday to help the National Park Service scale that roadblock to providing visitors with the full range of experiences meant to showcase the history of the Atomic Age. Manhattan on the Mesa, an interactive exhibit, takes visitors “behind the fence” to five buildings within the Los Alamos lab’s Technical Area 18, which until 2005 had been storing sensitive nuclear weapons material.
The lab and the Energy Department funded the project, in partnership with New Mexico Highlands University’s Program in Interactive Cultural Technology. Students in the Highlands program used their technical expertise to create a “virtual tour” of the off-limit areas, a task that required some students to don protective clothing and make a real visit to the sites and film them.
Patricia Chavez, who recently earned her degree in fine arts from Highlands and served as a project manager for the
exhibit, said she and others had to get special approval and protective gear for themselves and their camera equipment before they could tour the buildings at Technical Area 18.
The story of the Manhattan Project drove many of the students’ interest, she said. “How the United States put together this secret town, to create this secret weapon, was all very interesting.”
Linda Deck, director of the Bradbury Science Museum, said the new exhibit details the history of five key Manhattan Project-era buildings, including the Slotin Building, a bunker used for non-nuclear explosives testing and Pond Cabin. The log-andstone structure, first used as a personal library for Ashley Pond, the founder of the Los Alamos Ranch School for wealthy boys, was where scientist Emilio Segrè first studied plutonium fission.
The Ranch School closed in early 1943 when the U.S. Army took over its campus to create a secret home for the Manhattan Project scientists.
Deck said the historic buildings are critical parts of the national park experience. Some have faulty roofing and lead paint, issues that prevent public access, and other sites pose security concerns.
“When you think of Yellowstone, it’s the hot springs’ geysers” that draw visitors, Deck said. “For the Manhattan Project, it’s the buildings, because that’s where the work actually went on.”
The new exhibit nods to the lab’s history of secrecy. A postcard-size “secret pass” with a radio-frequency chip, designed by the Highlands students, helps visitors follow the story of the Manhattan Project and find hidden imagery throughout the exhibit.
The card leads visitors to an interactive video that shows the buildings as they are today and a multidrawer box that offers a sensory experience of the buildings. One drawer opens to reveal the scent of explosives; another smells like burned technical equipment. A third drawer contains a lone screwdriver meant to represent the tool that led to Slotin’s death.
The exhibit does not explicitly address moral or ethical questions about the work of building atomic bombs.
“We are not here to talk about any of the decisions that were made by the government,” Deck said. “We are part of the Department of Energy. There is a task to do, and so we do it. It is not our place to interpret the policies.”
Another joint effort between Highlands and the museum was updating the museum’s history film, dating back to the 1970s and titled The Town that Never Was.
The original film began with a priest praying before a statue of Jesus. It included footage of goosestepping Nazi soldiers. Those are absent in the new version, along with sections about how the community’s early homes easily caught fire near a plutonium facility, a segment showing high explosives transported through town over bumpy roads and details about the name “Los Alamos” being absent from mailing addresses and driver’s licenses.
Instead, the new history film focuses on the scientific work of making the first bombs and how this mission evolved through the Cold War and into the lab’s current enterprises.
Chavez, who is heading to the University of Southern California for a master’s program in the fall, said the new film, Racing Toward Dawn, which she co-directed and edited, “depicts the urgency of the achievements, but yet it shows the sorrow.”
“The main goal and main focus was to end the war,” she said. “And I think that was the ethical reason for telling the story the way we did — for showing the sorrow, the devastation, but also the successes.”