This section tells about the "Secret City" of Los Alamos.

There was one thing that made Los Alamos different from any other town that had ever been – can anyone think of what that was? (the town was a secret) It was a town like many others, with hundreds of people, a school, a grocery store, theatre, laundry, etc. But if you lived here it was supposed to be a secret. You could not tell friends or family where you were living. You could not even mention the name of the town. Not even the code names for the town could be mentioned. Do you know what the code names or nicknames were? (Manhattan Project; Project Y; the “Hill”)

Why would the government want to keep the town a secret? (So that our enemies would not know what we were doing and to help keep out spies.) However, one spy did work here, as we discovered after the war. His name was Klaus Fuchs and he sold information about the bomb to Russia. Even though we were fighting on the same side as Russia in WWII, we did not want them to know what we were working on. When people here found out that Fuchs was a spy they were shocked because everyone had thought him a nice young man who had been a favorite babysitter for people with young children.

If you were going to try to keep a town a secret how would you do it?

Here’s what the Army did here:

• Fence.
• Guards on horseback.
• Guarded gates. Only 2 gates into town.
• A special pass to enter and leave.
• No telephones in homes, only in a few offices. Phone conversations monitored.
• Mail censored, both incoming and outgoing. You sent your letter to a censor who read it and mailed it for you. If the censor read something he did not like in a letter you wrote he would send it back to you and tell you to change it. You couldn’t even let people know that your mail was being censored. You were not allowed to describe the town or mention the names of the people who lived here.
• False names. Many of the world-famous scientists who lived here were given aliases so they could not be identified by outsiders easily. Niels Bohr became Nicholas Baker and Enrico Fermi became Henry Farmer.
• Special driver’s license. No name, no address, no signature required, occupation always listed as engineer. If police stopped you for anything and saw your strange license they knew they had to let you go because you had something to do with special war work.
• Controlled travel. Allowed to go to Santa Fe occasionally to shop but not to Albuquerque. When in Santa Fe often followed by security men. Not supposed to speak to anyone. If someone questioned you, you were supposed to give vague answers and report the incident to security police. Kids were supposed to tell their parents if anyone asked them questions, even their names. If you had friends or relatives – even a mother or grandmother – who lived in Santa Fe or Albuquerque you could not tell them where you lived and you could not visit them.

Did it work? Did they really keep the town a secret? You can’t really hide a town, so people in Santa Fe knew there was a town here, but they didn’t know what went on here. Some people came pretty close to guessing but there were some pretty funny stories going around about what the Army was doing up here – like making windshield wipers for submarines!

Next>