109 East Palace (64 page)

When Robert Oppenheimer arrived in Santa Fe in March 1943, the Los Alamos Ranch School had been closed by the War Department and three thousand army engineers had turned it into a muddy construction site. The arriving physicists were appalled by the steep, twisting dirt road up the mountain and by the narrow Otowi Bridge, which was “too fragile” for heavy trucks.

No one could go to Los Alamos without first reporting to 109 East Palace, the small Santa Fe office that was a front for the classified laboratory (
below
). Dorothy’s job was to issue the security passes that had to be presented at the Main Gate (
left
) before anyone was permitted to enter the heavily guarded site.

General Leslie R. Groves (
left
) ran Los Alamos as a “no frills” military post, while Robert Oppenheimer fought to preserve a few civilizing touches.

Security at Los Alamos was designed to keep information and personnel from getting out. Military police patrolled the barbed-wire perimeter twenty-four hours a day, and the elaborate inspection process required for coming and going became the bane of the scientists’ and their families’ existence. Within the barbed wire fence penning the Tech Area (
below
) lay “the most secret part of the atomic bomb project.”

Los Alamos looked like a frontier boom town with row upon row of prefabricated apartment complexes all painted o.d.—“olive drab.” The old school trading post (
below
) sold an odd assortment of supplies, including little boys T-shirts and moccasins. The wooden water tower was the only landmark by which newcomers could orient themselves among the maze of unnamed streets.

Dorothy, Oppenheimer, and Victor Weisskopf at a party in Los Alamos, circa 1944.

Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, enjoyed the perks of being the “First Lady” of Los Alamos, but she was moody and withdrawn and did not participate in the mesa’s active social life.