Warday

Our driver told us that there had been aserious attack by local residents right after the soldiers left, and some of the damage to the library had been done then. Local people had also talked of trials for the Los Alamos scientists, but there had been no arrests.

Nevertheless, the scientists had been glad to leave when they could.

Which, it seems, is the central reality of Los Alamos. It is a place of leavings and departures, empty houses and abandoned lives. Nuclear science is a disliked religion in this area. Los Alamos people never spend the night in Santa Fe, and prefer to go in with Japanese guards when they can.

As we moved across the mesa, we saw that more buildings were gutted. I recognized these structures. On my last visit to Los Alamos, highly classified work on particle-beam weapons had been going on here. The labs have been moved in their entirety to Japan.

And their scientists have gone with them. There is anew “Atomic City,” it seems, being built near Osaka. Los Alamos is a place of caretakers.

The plutonium fabrication plant was still standing, though hardly intact. It was as warm with technicians who were dismantling it and crating its exotic innards as reverently as doctors might pack living hearts for transplant.

I wanted to go up to one of those Japanese workmen in his white coveralls and shake him and tell him that he was infecting himself and his people. I thought, Japan, Japan, surely you have learned. Let this place be a museum, and let these people be its caretakers.

We crossed the bridge that connected one mesa with the other and drove into what had been the main residential and commercial district of prewar Los Alamos. Most buildings were boarded up.

But there was a lively open-air market and an astonishing atmosphere of prosperity. The families of the “Japanese friends,” as they call themselves, live in many of the houses vacated by American scientists who have already gone to Atomic City.

I asked whether they had any choice. Our guide smiled. “We’re going, that’s all I know. The scientist is part of the laboratory.”

Were they paid?

“Listen. We’re treated like gods. Paid? That isn’t the word for it. You get cars, housing, schooling for your kids, all food and medical care free, and enough yen to buy the whole damn state of New Mexico. I don’t know what would happen if anybody refused to go. Nobody does!”

I found in myself a kind of desperate urgency. Skill and intelligence are such valuable resources, and America needs them so badly now. I wanted to say to him, please don’t go. Then I saw a gleam down in the canyon—a car that had been pushed off in the night by angry locals.

Can you blame them, though? This is the central station of the nuclear age.

Our guide sensed our discomfiture at what was happening here, and explained that scientific study had come to a standstill in America. Science was to some extent blamed for the war. But even where this wasn’t true, there was no money, as he put it, for contemplation.

“That’s what you need,” he added. “Without contemplation there is no science.” I felt the vast silence around me and heard the wind whispering in the pines and realized the depth of that truth.

I thought about the friendships I had made in Los Alamos before the war, and the combination of awe and apprehension that I had felt when I first interviewed the scientists and first heard them tell of their work on weapons. I wondered then if it was possible to be divorced from the consequences of one’s work. It seemed to me that no matter how subtle the problem a given weapon presented or how artful its contemplation might be, the ashes and the bones in the end would be the same.

It wasn’t until we were returning across the Rio Grande, on the same bridge that brought Oppenheimer and his men here in 1940, that my mood began to lift. Despite all the thoughts that have hung electric in this air, the cottonwoods are still full and green. Across the way, the pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara gleamed in the sun. There were Indians working the land there, as they had for centuries. Los Alamos, for all its modern history, is returning to ancient ways.

PART TWO California Dangers

You road I enter upon and look around,

I believe you are not all that is here,
I believe that much unseen is also here.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

California P.O.E

The old Superliner clicks along the tracks. Jim and I are sitting in the observation car, staring out the wide picture windows at the desert. I haven’t been to Los Angeles since 1983. In those days I used to do a certain amount of business with the film companies, and I made occasional trips west. I never cared much for Los Angeles; people who are consciously trying to be relaxed make me nervous. Jim has been to L.A. more recently, but not since the war.