Sharing the LANL legacy
While LANL researchers like Williams and Barclay were learning more about the origin of their institute, Oppenheimer doesn’t cover what happened to LANL after the Manhattan Project, leaving the viewer to do their own research. “The movie is very much about the man and not the site or the institution,” said Williams. “I think the portrayal [of LANL] was a good one. But it was tangential.”
Since the end of the Manhattan Project, LANL’s footprint has grown significantly. “After the Second World War, there was a period of uncertainty as to what the future would be,” Mason told Ars. “There were big debates about things like civilian control of atomic energy and atomic weapons; eventually, when the dust settled, it led to the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission.”
During these debates, Los Alamos rebranded itself into the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), only to be renamed LANL later. Regardless of its name, it continued to draw the brightest scientific minds to its doors as a “mecca” for nuclear physics. “In the ’40s, they brought in not only Oppenheimer but also a bunch of different people like von Neumann and people like that to work on the atomic bomb,” said Barclay. “They still have a bunch of great scientists here.” Today, Los Alamos boasts the highest number of PhDs per capita of any US city.
With the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, the US Department of Energy used LANL as a template for the creation of several other national labs. “You saw a number of new institutions emerge as a consequence of the Manhattan Project,” added Mason. “So, the National Labs, as we know them today, many of them had their seeds planted directly, like at Oak Ridge National Lab or Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, which, of course, was instrumental in getting things going in the first place. Also, some new institutions are created, like Argonne National Lab in Chicago.”
