Hunner J. Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community

University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. - 288 pp.A social history of New Mexico’s “Atomic City”.
Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the Atomic Age, is the community that revolutionized modern weaponry and science. An “instant city,” created in 1943, Los Alamos quickly grew to accommodate six thousand people — scientists and experts who came to work in the top-secret laboratories, others drawn by jobs in support industries, and the families. How these people, as a community, faced both the fevered rush to create an atomic bomb and the intensity of the subsequent cold-war era is the focus of Jon Hunner’s fascinating narrative history.
Much has been written about scientific developments at Los Alamos, but until this book little has been said about the community that fostered them. Using government records and the personal accounts of early residents, Inventing Los Alamos traces the evolution of the town during its first fifteen years as home to a national laboratory and documents the town’s creation, the lives of the families who lived there, and the impact of this small community on the Atomic Age.Rendezvous at Site Y: The Instant City.
Fishing in the Desert with Fat Man: Civic Tension, Atomic Explosion.
Postwar Los Alamos: Exodus, New Growth, and Invisible Danger.
Los Alamos Transformed: Federal Largesse and Red Challenge.
A Cold War Community Up in Arrns: Competition and Conformity.
Toward Normalizing Los Alamos: Cracking the Gates.
Atomic City on a Hill: Legacy and Continuing Research.