Bradbury Science Museum

Free museum documenting the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos National Laboratory

The Bradbury Science Museum is the public visitor centre for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and it is free. The displays cover the history of the Manhattan Project in unusual depth: the recruitment of scientists from universities across America, the construction of a secret city on a remote New Mexico plateau, and the development of the two bomb designs (Little Boy and Fat Man) that ended the Second World War.

Artefacts include replicas of the two bomb designs, historical photographs and documents, and exhibits on the modern laboratory's work in nuclear weapons, national security, and energy research. The museum is not sensationalised — it presents the science and the decisions plainly, and leaves judgements to the visitor. Allow an hour and a half.

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A story
The first nuclear bomb was tested at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945 — the result of three years of secret work here on the Pajarito Plateau. The scientists who built it had no certainty it would work. Enrico Fermi offered side bets on whether the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the state of New Mexico or merely the entire world. He was joking, but the fact that the bet seemed worth making says something about the state of knowledge at the time.

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