Had J Robert Oppenheimer not gotten sick in 1922, the Manhattan project would have been sited elsewhere in the US and Los Alamos National Laboratory would never have existed in New Mexico.
What could be more consequential for northern New Mexico than the siting of the Manhattan Project on the Pajarito Plateau during World War II, and eventually Los Alamos National Laboratory? The Manhattan Project came to New Mexico in 1942 by a simple twist of fate. It’s existence in northern New Mexico eventually led to a LANL as a large employment center, source of pollution, and permanent changes to the landscape.
Robert Oppenheimer a physicist from New York City directed Project Y (the Manhattan Project), the secret effort to create an atomic bomb during World War II. Yet before he got his PhD in Europe, he emerged from high school in New York a sickly young man, struggling to stay in the game. In 1921 he contracted dysentery, colitis, and maybe a case of tuberculosis. Right when he wanted to fly the coup and start his life, he was laid up in his parent’s opulent house in New York.
At that time New Mexico had many sanitoriums for tuberculosis patients and people from the humid eastern states would come to breath the dry, thin mountain air as a cure for this respiratory disease. Many of them stayed in New Mexico and contributed greatly to our state, people like John Gaw Meem and Edith Warner.
Oppenheimer was frustrated by his sickness but so was his father. When Oppenheimer began to get better, his father called Herbert Smith, a prominent teacher at the Ethical Culture School from where Oppenheimer had just graduated. Julius Oppenheimer asked Smith to take Oppie out West to “toughen him up.”
Oppenheimer Meets New Mexico
By chance, Smith chose New Mexico as a place for Oppie to toughen up. He took him on a tour of the state that ended at the Los Pinos Guest Ranch in Cowles, New Mexico. A young woman named Katherine Chaves Page ran the lodge and welcomed Smith and Oppenheimer to her rustic cluster of cabins on Panchuela Creek. She took Oppie out on long horseback rides into the Pecos Wilderness and beyond. By all accounts, the bachelor Oppenheimer struck up an deep friendship with Katherine.
On one of these long horseback rides, Oppenheimer rode to the west with his bag of sausage and bread. He and his companions crossed the Rio Grande Valley and trailed up onto the Pajarito Plateau where he saw the Los Alamos Ranch School for the first time and rode up into what is now the Valles Caldera National Preserve. This trip cemented Oppie’s interest in the Jemez Mountains and the beautiful volcanic cliffs that subtend Los Alamos. This was the trip that sealed the fate of the Pajarito Plateau as the future home of atomic science.
Oppenheimer fell in love with New Mexico and came back after he graduated from Harvard. In 1928 Katherine Page took Oppie and his brother Frank on a ride up Grass Mountain, east of the Los Pino Ranch. She showed them a square-hewn cabin, probably dating from the late 19th century that sat on a large tract of land bordered by national forest, overlooking Lake Peak and Santa Fe Baldy with the sound of the Pecos River below.
Legend has it Katherine told Oppie that the place was for rent. “Hot Dog!” he exclaimed. She corrected him to “Perro Caliente”. He rented the cabin and later bought it, bringing many famous physicists, mathematicians and others to take long horseback rides and talk deep into the night.
In those days the road from Santa Fe to Pecos was a small road and the road to Cowles from Pecos was a rough dirt road. Getting to his cabin was time consuming and convincing his physicist friends from California and the east coast to make the voyage must have taken persuasion. Oppenheimer was an engaging, brilliant person who took center stage in any room he entered.
Sadly, after the Manhattan Project ended in 1945, Oppenheimer came to New Mexico less and less. He was at Princeton when he tangled with the far-right Joseph McCarthy gang and his old nemesis Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss who got his security clearance revoked due to his wife’s association with communists in Berkeley in his post Harvard years.
The real reason his security clearance was revoked was his anti-nuclear activism. He had overseen the creation of the first atomic bombs, witnessed the first detonation at Trinity Site, and felt strongly that these weapons must not be developed further. On the other hand, Edward Teller wanted to create the “super,” the hydrogen bomb that would be many times more powerful than the bombs detonated over Japan. Teller questioned Oppenheimer’s patriotism in opposing American development of these huge nuclear bombs.
Oppenheimer’s spirit was crushed by his prolonged battle with the right in Washington. Ultimately, his tobacco habit killed him in 1967.
He last visited Los Alamos in in the mid 1960s. His cabin in the Pecos went quiet. Today it is owned by his son Peter.
To my readers: I’ve had a very busy summer out in the field with little time to sit at my computer. I hope to offer more writing to you as the winter progresses.
