Exploring Secrets and Spies in “Atomic City,” New Mexico

Historic Santa Fe, a center for creative arts, is perfectly located for day trips to Taos, Chimayo, and Bandelier National Monument. However, nearby Los Alamos, with its distinct history, often goes unnoticed.

Perched at 7,350 feet above sea level and home to a modest population of 12,978, this isolated town on the Pajarito Plateau was the secret site for atomic bomb development in the mid-1940s. Its remoteness was intentional; residents used a Santa Fe address for mail, as Los Alamos was officially unacknowledged.

Today, Los Alamos is just a 45-minute drive from Santa Fe, whereas during World War II, it was a challenging two-hour journey along narrow dirt roads. Scientists began arriving in April 1943 for the Manhattan Project, tasked with creating the first atomic weapons. This collaboration included top European researchers and emerging talents like Richard Feynman, recruited while pursuing his PhD at Princeton. As the project expanded from a few hundred to several thousand participants, a makeshift 20th-century frontier town emerged, raising security concerns. Notably, Einstein, due to his political views, was denied clearance and could not contribute. The project was shrouded in secrecy and urgency, fraught with drama.

Under the direction of General Leslie Groves, the Manhattan Project quickly transformed Los Alamos into an “Atomic City,” overseen by the U.S. Army. While the shared goal was to win the war, some civilians working on the project leaked highly classified information to the Soviet Union. Over the 27 months leading to the bombings in Japan in August 1945, the intense atmosphere in Los Alamos made such leaks almost unavoidable. Secrets and deception brought about spies.

Christopher Nolan's new film, Oppenheimer, was primarily filmed on location in Los Alamos during spring 2022. It centers on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific leader of “Project Y.” As the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he played a pivotal role in developing the atomic bomb, including recruiting top scientists from comfortable academic positions to this remote location.

Though the wartime town of prefab semicircular Quonset huts has vanished, you can still experience its history through the impressive exhibits at the Bradbury Science Museum (free) and the Los Alamos History Museum ($5). Imagine the pressure: developing a powerful new weapon with unstable elements like uranium—any lab mistake could be catastrophic. The Bradbury museum offers an engaging presentation of this complex task through numerous interactive displays, including two brief videos that provide an essential introduction to the mission.

Nearby, the history museum effectively summarizes the project through a video featuring insights from those who participated in the bomb’s creation, informative placards detailing key figures and events, wartime photographs, and artifacts ranging from household items to laboratory tools. Among these is a facsimile of Einstein’s 1939 letter to FDR, cautioning about Nazi Germany’s potential atomic developments. For $25, you can join a 90-minute guided walking tour (twice daily) for a deeper understanding of Los Alamos. Notably, the history museum was once a guest cottage for General Groves.

The walking tour features a stop at Bathtub Row, named for being the only residences in town equipped with bathtubs. This street, lined with historic wooden houses from the former Los Alamos Ranch School (an outdoor prep school for boys), was home to top scientists, including Hans Bethe, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Oppenheimer’s residence is also located here, though it’s currently undergoing renovation and is not accessible.

Both the history museum and its tour provide valuable insights into a crucial aspect of the classified project: the presence of spies among the staff who were leaking information to the Soviet Union.

Discover the story of young recruit Ted Hall, a Harvard physicist who cleverly used Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a codebook to relay secrets to the Soviets, managing to evade detection until after the war. (He was never prosecuted because the federal government wanted to keep his work confidential.) Other identified spies included Klaus Fuchs, a German-British physicist; Oscar Seborer, an American electrical engineer; and David Greenglass, a U.S. Army machinist.

Embark on a self-guided tour of spy-related landmarks in Los Alamos and Santa Fe. Notably, in the central plaza of Santa Fe, at 109 E. Palace Avenue—disguised within the Rainbow Man shop—is a plaque honoring this location as the office where newcomers were processed before being sent to “the Hill” (Los Alamos). The historic La Fonda Hotel, filled with art, served as a retreat for those confined at Los Alamos and remains a popular getaway for visitors. At that time, Santa Fe was also a key location for spies exchanging information.

Today, Los Alamos houses the Los Alamos National Laboratory and likely has the highest concentration of PhDs in any non-university town. If you visit the modest Manhattan Project National Historical Park next to Ashley Pond, you can see historic photos and grab a useful brochure for a DIY walking tour of central Los Alamos, featuring sites related to the Manhattan Project. (This park also includes two additional sites: Site X in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Site W at Hanford, Washington.)

The Manhattan Project NHP offers restricted “behind-the-fence” tours only twice a year, with the next and last opportunities for 2023 scheduled in October. Access to the Trinity bomb detonation site near Alamogordo, about 200 miles to the south, is available on the first Saturday of April and October. The intense heat from the Trinity explosions melted sand into a glass-like substance known as trinitite. For an in-depth exploration, Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours will visit all three Manhattan Project sites—Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge—in October 2024.

While traveling to or from Los Alamos, consider a brief stop at White Rock’s Overlook Point. The stunning view, including the Rio Grande, offers a glimpse of the area’s historical isolation.