Accommodations were spartan, but the intellectual atmosphere was heady, electric-in some ways, they were still a bunch of boys at play. The army had converted a former boys’ school into barracks for the scientists the compound quickly grew into a town. With his crumpled brown hat, Oppenheimer would become the iconic atomic cowboy, a New Yorker turned California physicist who had chosen Los Alamos as the site for a secret weapons lab because it was near the ranchland he had come to love. Robert Oppenheimer and Major General Leslie R. Fermi, Segrè, Bohr (father and son), Weisskopf, Ulam, Teller, Rabi, Bethe, and von Neumann, among many others-an international mix of past and future Nobel laureates, refugees, and recent immigrants from Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Germany, Russia, and such, with a pair of Americans to lead them: J. The scientists were supposed to use Americanized code names, but they were properly known as Drs. They came in cars, in trucks, in buses, in Packard limousines-an inconspicuous convoy winding south into the wastelands of the Jornada del Muerto, a dry and deadly shortcut on the ancient Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, or “Royal Road of the Interior Land.” One of the longest and oldest trails in North America, the route carried Indians, Mexicans, and conquistadors north from Mexico City for centuries, and since at least 1680-when some six hundred colonists and converted Pueblos died in the crossing-this stretch has lived up to its name: “Journey of the Dead.” They drove for hours from the secret wartime city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, to a desert test site called Trinity, which they had been readying for months. In July of 1945, the men came down from the mesa to set off a bomb. From The History of the Future: American Essays (May 2017, Coffee House Press)
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