Children of Los Alamos

by Katrina R. Mason

Katrina R. Mason has interviewed a wide range of people who spent all or parts of their childhoods in Los Alamos - from its muddy beginnings in 1943, when residents officially lived at P.O. Box 1663, to the late 1950s, after the laboratory had come under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission - to create this engaging and provocative portrait of a place that has come to epitomize both the scientific advances and the moral ambiguities of this century. Collectively the wartime children of Los Alamos - the children of scientists, of machinists and technicians from around the country, of construction workers from Texas and Oklahoma, and of Spanish Americans - constituted a microcosm of the United States. Mason identifies three elements common to their childhood recollections: a magnetic attraction to the land; a sense of security, that children always felt safe there; and multiculturalism. Almost all the children interviewed attribute their interest in other cultures and ability to g