Here is something most New Mexican residents don't know about the Manhattan Project [View all]

Thought this was a good time to post this with the new Oppenheim movie coming out on the 21st of July.

By Larry Bleiberg
29th January 2020
Most visitors will walk past 109 E Palace in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and have no idea that they are passing the site that once served as Robert Oppenheimer’s office.


In the courtyard of a gift shop decorated with colorful ceramic frogs and dragonflies, it’s easy to overlook the historic marker.

Perhaps that’s fitting for a secret site.

In the early 1940s, the world’s top scientists and their families trudged through this patio, bedraggled from a cross-country train trip. Most didn’t know where they were headed. All they had were classified orders to report to the address "109 East Palace, Santa Fe, New Mexico”. When they opened the wrought iron gate, they entered what the National Historical Landmark plaque calls a “portal to their secret mission”, which was to build the atomic bomb.

“They came in through the courtyard,” said Marianne Kapoun, who with her husband owns The Rainbow Man gift shop, which occupies the formerly classified facility. Visitors now enter the shop through a front door; the historical entrance where scientists like Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman once passed, is blocked, and the walkway cluttered with dangling ceramic chillies and hand-painted jack-o-lantern gourds.

The newcomers, which included a contingent of British scientists, were issued security passes and loaded from the facility onto a bus or a Jeep for the last leg of their journey. Their destination lay 35 miles away, up tortuous, unpaved mountain roads, in the hidden settlement of Los Alamos. And what they eventually accomplished, the plaque says, was “one of the greatest scientific achievements in human history”.

But few modern visitors to Santa Fe, a Spanish colonial city known for its adobe buildings and art galleries, realise they’re crossing paths with Nobel laureates – and a nest of spies.

During World War Two, the small city was on the frontlines of the race to build the atomic bomb. Over a period of 27 months, the US Army built the secret Los Alamos research laboratory in the Jemez Mountains and designed an unimaginably powerful weapon that eventually destroyed two Japanese cities, effectively ending the war and ushering in the atomic age.

More: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200128-an-atomic-marker-hidden-in-plain-sight#:~:text=Most%20didn't%20know%20where,to%20build%20the%20atomic%20bomb.