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The Women at Los Alamos: Scientists, Computers, and the Bomb
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Inside the sealed city of Los Alamos, women mathematicians and physicists did the calculations that made the atomic bomb possible — and received almost none of the credit. This episode recovers their stories, from Leona Woods at Chicago Pile-1 to the human computers who solved implosion by hand.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
They built the most powerful weapon in human history. They did it in secret, under the desert sun, surrounded by barbed wire and military checkpoints.
To understand what Los Alamos felt like from the inside, you have to understand what it actually was. Not the sanitized version.
Women came to Los Alamos through several different channels, and that matters because the experience wasn't uniform. Some came as wives.
And then there were the women who came as scientists in their own right. That number was small.
What's striking about the accounts that survive is how much ordinary life continued alongside extraordinary work. The wives who came with no job assignment organized schools for the children who were growing up inside the fence.
Trinity happened on July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five. The device detonated at five-thirty in the morning in the desert thirty-five miles from Socorro, New Mexico.
Hiroshima was August sixth, nineteen forty-five. The uranium bomb called Little Boy killed approximately a hundred thousand people.
The history of the Manhattan Project took a particular shape in the decades after the war. It centered on Oppenheimer and Fermi and Groves and Teller.
The Manhattan Project was the largest scientific mobilization in history. What it took to build the bomb included everything.
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