The Manhattan Project The laboratory was founded during
World War II as a secret, centralized facility to coordinate the scientific research of the
Manhattan Project, the
Allied project to develop the first
nuclear weapons. In September 1942, the difficulties encountered in conducting preliminary studies on
nuclear weapons at universities scattered across the country indicated the need for a laboratory dedicated solely to that purpose. General
Leslie Groves wanted a central laboratory at an isolated location for safety, and to keep the scientists away from the populace. It should be at least 200 miles from international boundaries and west of the Mississippi. Major
John Dudley suggested
Oak City, Utah, or
Jemez Springs, New Mexico, but both were rejected. Jemez Springs was only a short distance from the current site. Project Y director
J. Robert Oppenheimer had spent much time in his youth in the New Mexico area and suggested the
Los Alamos Ranch School on the
mesa. Dudley had rejected the school as not meeting Groves' criteria, but as soon as Groves saw it he said in effect "This is the place." Oppenheimer became the laboratory's first director; from 19 October 1942. During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos hosted thousands of employees, including many
Nobel Prize-winning scientists. The location was a total secret. Its only mailing address was a post office box, number 1663, in
Santa Fe, New Mexico. Eventually two other post office boxes were used, 180 and 1539, also in Santa Fe. Though its contract with the
University of California was initially intended to be temporary, the relationship was maintained long after the war. Until the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Japan, University of California president
Robert Sproul did not know what the purpose of the laboratory was and thought it might be producing a "
death ray." The only member of the UC administration who knew its true purpose—indeed, the only one who knew its exact physical location—was the Secretary-Treasurer Robert Underhill (younger brother of Marine Corps general
James Underhill and Army colonel Lewis Underhill), who was in charge of wartime contracts and liabilities. He first visited the site in mid-March 1943 and was informed of the project objective by
Ernest Lawrence in November 1943. The work of the laboratory culminated in Los Alamos assembling several atomic devices, one of which was used in the first
nuclear test near
Alamogordo, New Mexico, codenamed "
Trinity," on July 16, 1945. The other two were weapons, "
Little Boy" and "
Fat Man," which were used in the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Laboratory received the
Army-Navy "E" Award for Excellence in production on October 16, 1945.
Post-war As the
Cold War and its
nuclear arms race began, Los Alamos remained central to the US effort. Under the "Super" program, Los Alamos physicists including
Edward Teller and
Stanisław Ulam developed of the world's first
thermonuclear weapons,
Greenhouse George and
Ivy Mike. In the years since the 1940s, Los Alamos was responsible for the development of the
hydrogen bomb, and many other variants of nuclear weapons. In 1952,
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was founded to act as Los Alamos' "competitor," with the hope that two laboratories for the design of nuclear weapons would spur innovation. Los Alamos and Livermore served as the primary classified laboratories in the U.S. national laboratory system, designing all the country's nuclear arsenal. Additional work included basic scientific research,
particle accelerator development, health physics, and fusion power research as part of
Project Sherwood. Many nuclear tests were undertaken in the
Marshall Islands and at the
Nevada Test Site. During the late-1950s, a number of scientists including
Dr. J. Robert "Bob" Beyster left Los Alamos to work for
General Atomics (GA) in
San Diego. Three major nuclear-related accidents have occurred at LANL.
Criticality accidents occurred in August 1945 and May 1946, and a third accident occurred during an annual physical inventory in December 1958. Los Alamos physicist
Samuel T. Cohen is sometimes regarded as the
father of the
neutron bomb. Several buildings associated with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos were declared a
National Historic Landmark in 1965. As the demand for detailed simulation of
nuclear explosions grew, Los Alamos became involved in the origins of
supercomputers. Los Alamos was one of the first users of the
IBM 7030 Stretch in the early 1960s, and of the
Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976.
Post-Cold War At the end of the
Cold War, both labs went through a process of intense scientific diversification in their research programs to adapt to the changing political conditions that no longer required as much research towards developing new nuclear weapons and has led the lab to increase research for "non-war" science and technology. Los Alamos' nuclear work is currently thought to relate primarily to computer simulations and
stockpile stewardship. The development of the
Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility will allow complex simulations of nuclear tests to take place without full explosive yields. The laboratory contributed to the early development of the
flow cytometry technology. In the 1950s, researcher Mack Fulwyler developed a technique for sorting
erythrocytes that combined the Coulter Principle of
Coulter counter technologies, which measures the presence of cells and their size, with ink jet technology, which produces a laminar flow of liquid that breaks up into separate, fine drops. In 1969, Los Alamos reported the first fluorescence detector apparatus, which accurately measured the number and size of ovarian cells and blood cells. As of 2017, other research performed at the lab included developing cheaper, cleaner biofuels and advancing scientific understanding around renewable energy. Non-nuclear
national security and defense development is also a priority at the lab. This includes preventing outbreaks of deadly diseases by improving detection tools and the monitoring the effectiveness of the United States'
vaccine distribution infrastructure. Additional advancements include the ASPECT airplane that can detect bio threats from the sky.
Medical work In 2008, development for a safer, more comfortable and accurate test for
breast cancer was ongoing by scientists Lianjie Huang and Kenneth M. Hanson and collaborators. The new technique, called ultrasound-computed tomography (ultrasound CT), uses sound waves to accurately detect small tumors that traditional mammography cannot. The lab has made intense efforts for
humanitarian causes through its scientific research in medicine. In 2010, three vaccines for the
Human Immunodeficiency Virus were being tested by lab scientist
Bette Korber and her team. "These vaccines might finally deal a lethal blow to the
AIDS virus", says Chang-Shung Tung, leader of the Lab's Theoretical Biology and Biophysics group.
Negative publicity The laboratory has attracted negative publicity from a number of events. In 1999, Los Alamos scientist
Wen Ho Lee was accused of 59 counts of mishandling classified information by downloading nuclear secrets—"weapons codes" used for computer simulations of nuclear weapons tests—to data tapes and removing them from the lab. After ten months in jail, Lee pleaded guilty to a single count of unauthorized possession of documents, but the other 58 were dismissed with an apology from U.S. District Judge
James Parker for his incarceration. Lee had been suspected for having shared U.S. nuclear secrets with
China, but investigators were never able to establish what Lee did with the downloaded data. In 2000, two computer hard drives containing classified data were announced to have gone missing from a secure area within the laboratory, but were later found behind a photocopier. == Science mission ==