In which Moominmama visits Los Alamos to learn about the Manhattan Project, a contrast with an earlier journey to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park....

In 1932, we have the first recorded, successful splitting of an atom (a lithium atom). Less than a year later, Adolf Hitler became head of the German government. By 1939, the Germans forbid the sale of uranium from a mine in Czechoslovakia. There were good reasons to fear that Germany knew about the potential of fission and was exploring the development of an atom bomb.

This was the background that led to Project Y, also known as the Manhattan Project, America's bid to build the most powerful weapons in the world and to get them first.

Ironically, the war with Germany would end before the American effort was successful. Instead, the two slightly different atom bombs were used on Japan. Hiroshima was the first, and for its people, there was absolutely no warning. 

If you recognize the picture above, you'll know it's not New Mexico. While the Bradbury Museum at the Los Alamos National Labs proudly displays replicas of the bombs and pictures of their makers, I did not have the heart to post them.

Moominmama knows something of the other side of the story, the one where thousands of innocent people were going about their daily lives when the bomb exploded over their heads (this one exploded; the other one imploded). I took these two photos in Hiroshima in 2015.

The domed building, now part of the memorial, survived largely because the blast was directly overhead and not at an angle. The steel and stone walls survived, and a man who'd gone into the basement to get something actually walked out of this building alive.

This is according to the stories told at the Peace Memorial Park, where Japanese docents are chosen because they have a personal connection to these events. Most of them were children when the bomb destroyed Hiroshima, and while they were far enough away to avoid death or radiation poisoning, they had stories of parents and siblings who were not. 

Children who went off to the country that day while their fathers went into the city to work. Children who were overjoyed to be reunited with people they loved only to see them languish and die of strange symptoms.

It chokes Moominmama up even now to remember those stories. And they all came back to me as I toured the museum in Los Alamos and learned the history of our atomic weapons. The scientists (average age of 29 at the time) believed then, and the museum still argues, that these weapons and the know-how to make them, are a deterrent to war. But it is unmistakable, the self-satisfied look on President Truman's face in an old video clip when he is about to tell Stalin that America has "the bomb" in July of 1945.

Stalin apparently did not offer up the expected jaw-drop because his spies had already told him of the successful American test near Alamogordo. In 1949, the Russians tested their first atomic bomb, and the race grew from there. 

Los Alamos National Laboratories no longer tests atomic weapons except via computer models and small-scale experiments to help them refine their mathematical models. They do research that helps maintain or downsize the aging nuclear arsenal safely, as well as other scientific research that's unrelated.

Norris Bradbury, for whom this museum is named, led the post-war institution into the modern era and the property is now the site of a vast number of research projects -- including, believe it or not, archeology.

Back when J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves were looking for a site for Project Y, they saw the mesas in and around Los Alamos as "impossibly remote." 

It was interesting to learn that Oppenheimer had actually spent time in the area as a young man and knew the land at least somewhat. 

If he rode horseback over and around these mesas and canyons, he must have seen the evidence of human life, the rock art and ruins. They are all over, and the descendants of the Ancestral Pueblo are not far away.

And as exciting as the story was of intense work and dynamic discovery, of scientists finding ways to apply what they were learning in a time of high stakes to create an incredible weapon -- well, my mind goes back to Hiroshima and I cannot celebrate the achievement.

I do understand better why it happened, why the race began in the midst of a frightening world war.

After visiting the museum, I went out for a hike to clear my head in Tsankawi Village, where there are surviving petroglyphs and the land remains holy to the people of San Ildefonso Pueblo not far away.

Not easy to photograph, or even to see sometimes, but I loved this flute player! Kokopelli? There are also spirals carved into the cliffs and other human-like figures, all religious symbols I'm told. This site has not been excavated, in part because the Tewa people have asked that it be left as it is. 

I walked over ancient trails, paths that people have used for hundreds of years, forming grooves in the "tuff" like this ancient staircase.

But there is also evidence of modern interference. It can make you wonder if what you are seeing is authentic or something added more recently.

Then I saw this below: one person's religious symbol carved into the sacred stone of another person's holy ground. Would Christians not object to "pagan" symbols etched on the walls of their churches? It made me both sad and angry. We won't survive as a species if we don't get better at respecting rather than dominating - whether that involves weapons or religion.