On Santa Fe, Taos and Los Alamos

Here are my notes recorded while in New Mexico and Arizona. I will probably put more 'travel log' style stuff in later, but for now here are my thoughts, clearly heavily influnced by a museum devoted to The Bomb.

Tuesday October 29 we went to Taos and Los Alamos. What a contrast. First, if you ever go to Santa Fe, drive the scenic road to Taos - despite claims to the contrary there are very few bikable roads here - well all roads are bikable, but you come awful close to traffic. Anyway the drive to Taos requires numerous stops to take pictures, pack an extra battery and memory card for your camera, or if you are old school like me, another roll of film. The vistas are... Amazing, spectacular. As the second man to walk on the moon, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin said: "Magnificent Desolation".

In Taos we went to the Pueblo, besides paying an awful lot to see people live in appalling squalor, I cannot say it was worth it. Truth be told, drive to Taos then turn around, unless you came to go skiing, although if that is the case the scenic road is probably rather dangerous.

On the way back to Santa Fe we stopped in Los Alamos. Now apparently there is a beautiful national park nearby but we did not have time to see it. I will say the groceries in Los Alamos are a lot cheaper than Santa Fe, so is gasoline. Of course I did not want to go to Los Alamos for the gas and groceries. Some odd things noticed, Los Alamos is twinned with Sarov Russia, guess what they did in Sarov. The Los Alamos National Laboratory gets $2billion per year in funding and employs 11,000 people, the population of Los Alamos is about 25,000, so almost half the town is employed at the lab. Oh and the apples are really REALLY HUGE, maybe radiation? ;-) (The apples were grown in Washington State.)

We went to the science museum. And the first thing I saw were bomb cases, obviously they don't have any real bombs in a public museum. Now I just want to attribute a source here, Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer prize winning author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and "Dark Sun, The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" called the actual conical cases that would freight the bombs in during the re-entry, from their ballistic arc to their targets, dunce caps. They look like dunce caps, even about the same size. Nations behaved like dunces when they built these horrible things, well they had a real dunce cap at the museum. Standing in front of that MK-21 war head was frightening, even if it was a mockup.

Here is a dirty little known fact about the cold war, and is actually still true. If a missile launch was detected, and it would be, sometimes launches that never happened were detected, a flock of seagulls fooled one monitoring team. But if a launch was detected, the other side would return fire before the missile had even cleared the atmosphere. Well the first side would see multiple "birds" in the air (the response to the first missile) and they would fire everything, so the other guys, now seeing hundreds of launches would "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war". Before the first missile, maybe just a communications or weather satellite who's launch was not properly communicated had even achieved burn out, 3 minutes after engines start, several thousand nuclear weapons, with no abort, or undo, are in the air no more than 28 minutes from their destination, New York or Leningrad, Toronto or Warsaw.

I had hoped the museum would highlight the work and science of the great physicists who worked on the bomb during the war. Maybe a history of physics from Newton to Einstein. Instead too much effort was spent glorifying these awful things and the "good work" done at The Lab. Not to say that the building of satellites that will study the weather, or the moons of Neptune are at all a bad thing and that should be explained there. If Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship is really required then fine. But do 12 year old children who come to the museum need to learn about what great work is done to ensure that the bombs will still explode one hundred years from now? The Bomb cannot be uninvented, but the bombs can be unbuilt and they should be unbuilt, we don't need them and the existence of a US Nuclear Stockpile gives justification to other nations to build their own bombs.