Los Alamos

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located on a mesa in the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico, approximately 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe. Established as the Manhattan Project's weapons design laboratory (Project Y) in 1943 under scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos designed and built the first nuclear weapons, including "Little Boy" (uranium gun-type) and "Fat Man" (plutonium implosion) that were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The laboratory continues to design and certify nuclear weapons for the U.S. stockpile.¹

Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project - the American program to develop nuclear weapons during World War II - was headquartered at Los Alamos under the direction of Oppenheimer and Army General Leslie Groves. Scientists recruited to Los Alamos included European refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe as well as leading American physicists. The laboratory operated in extreme secrecy; workers in Los Alamos used P.O. Box 1663 as their postal address and were prohibited from disclosing their location.

The first nuclear test ("Trinity") was conducted at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. The bomb that detonated was a plutonium implosion design identical to "Fat Man."¹

Espionage and Security Failures

Los Alamos was penetrated by Soviet intelligence during the Manhattan Project through multiple agents, the most significant of whom was Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British physicist who was a Communist Party member. Fuchs provided the Soviets with detailed technical information on the implosion bomb design, information that accelerated Soviet nuclear weapons development by an estimated 2-5 years. Fuchs was arrested in January 1950 and confessed; his confession led to the identification of his American contact Harry Gold and subsequently to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage and executed in 1953.²

In 1999, Taiwanese-born Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee was accused of downloading classified nuclear weapons design files to portable hard drives. He was indicted on 59 counts of mishandling classified information; 58 counts were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to one count of downloading classified information to an unsecured computer. The case raised concerns about racial profiling in security investigations.¹

Connection to Vault Subjects

Several figures who appear in this vault worked at or had connections to Los Alamos:

• George A. Cowan, a nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos for over twenty years, acknowledged close associations with Israeli physicists from the Weizmann Institute, a connection relevant to Israel's nuclear weapons program
• Harold M. Agnew, Los Alamos director from 1970 to 1979, served on the Nuclear Intelligence Panel and was critical of the suppression of findings from the Vela Incident satellite detection of an apparent nuclear test off South Africa
• Carl E. Duckett, CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology, received intelligence contributed from Los Alamos through the CIA's Office of Science and Technology on nuclear matters²