Los Alamos National Laboratory


Los Alamos National Laboratory, aerial view from 1995. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) (previously known at various times as Los Alamos Laboratory and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory, managed by the University of California, located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the world. It is the largest institution and the largest employer in northern New Mexico with approximately 6,800 University of California employees plus approximately 2,800 contractor personnel. Approximately one-third of the Laboratory's technical staff members are physicists, one-fourth are engineers, one-sixth are chemists and materials scientists, and the remainder work in mathematics and computational science, biological science, geoscience, and other disciplines. Professional scientists and students also come to Los Alamos as visitors to participate in scientific projects. The staff collaborates with universities and industry in both basic and applied research to develop resources for the future. The annual budget is approximately $1.2 billion USD. From its origins during World War II through the end of the Cold War, Los Alamos was one the USA's two laboratories where classified work towards the design of nuclear weapons was undertaken (the other is Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, after 1952).

History

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 involved with conducting preliminary studies on nuclear weapons at universities scattered throughout the country indicated the need for a laboratory dedicated solely to that purpose. Manhattan Project scientific directory Robert Oppenheimer, who had spent much time in his youth in the New Mexico area, scouted the area along with General Leslie Groves and physicist Ernest O. Lawrence, and decided upon the mesa which was once the Los Alamos Ranch School. Oppenheimer became the laboratory's first director. During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos hosted thousands of employees in secret (its only mailing address was to a post office box in Santa Fe, New Mexico) along with many Nobel Prize winning scientists. Though its contract with the University of California was initially seen as temporary, the relationship was kept for long after the war. Until the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Robert Sproul, the president of the University of California, 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 even the true location of the lab—much less its true purpose—was the Secretary-Treasurer Robert Underhill, who was in charge of wartime contracts and liabilities. The "Trinity" nuclear test. The work of the laboratory culminated in the creation of three atomic bombs, one of which was used in the first nuclear test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, code-named "Trinity", on July 16, 1945. The other two weapons, "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. After the war, Oppenheimer retired from the directorship and it was taken over by Norris Bradbury, whose initial mission was to make the previously hand-assembled atomic bombs "G.I. proof" so that they could be mass produced and used without the assistance from highly trained scientists. Many of the original Los Alamos "luminaries" chose to leave the laboratory, and some even became outspoken opponents to the further development of nuclear weapons.

The Cold War

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 of 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 the Nevada Test Site.

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 which no longer required as much research towards developing new nuclear weapons. Los Alamos' nuclear work is currently thought to relate primarily to computer simulations and stockpile stewardship. In 2003, dissatisfaction with scandals at the laboratory led the Department of Energy to open its contract with the University of California to bids from other vendors. Though the University and the laboratory have had difficult relations many time since their first World War II contract, this is the first time that the University has ever had to compete for management of the laboratory. Names that have been mentioned among those interested in bidding for the laboratory include private contractors such as Lockheed-Martin and other universities such as the University of Texas. The Los Alamos National Laboratory also used to host the ArXiv.org e-print archive.

See also

Category:Manhattan Project Category:University of California Category:Nuclear weapons Category:Los Alamos County, New Mexico Category:U.S. National Labs de:Los Alamos National Laboratory ja:ロスアラモス国立研究所
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