The World's "Best" Address? POB 1663, Santa Fe. Home of the Atomic Bomb.

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This is a continuation of a series of posts relating to the development of the atomic bomb.

Park Avenue.  1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 10 Downing.  112 Mercer. Institute for Advanced Studies. The Cavendish Lab.  All pretty good addresses.  I have a hard time though coming up with a single best address that beats POB 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico.  For the sheer breadth of those represented by this simple location, I just can’t think of anything more specific or more inclusive.

Oppenheimer lived there.  So did Fermi. And Feynman. And Teller. And Bohr. And thousands of others. 

Post Office Box 1663, Santa Fe hid something very important—at the time, it was so important that the place that it was hiding didn’t even have a real name, just a moniker: Site Y.

 Many of the people who lived there didn’t have the use of their real names outside of Site Y.  Driver’s licenses were issued with numbers, and people paid taxes according to code numbers and weren’t allowed to vote.  They were as invisible as their address, or as invisible as thousands of people could be in 1942.  Being a place filled with mostly quite-young men and women, there were natural tendencies followed leading to a spike in birth rates, responded to famously by the facility’s chief to direct that actions be taken to stem the flow. Or perhaps not*. A radio station popped up featuring live performers, everyone identified by given name only. And to confound things further it was nestled within the range of the Blood of Christ (the Sangre de Christo)   Mountains, all the while working with matter that was literally hotter than hell. That was plutonium, and the “hot” was radioactivity. 

Site Y (begun in June 1942) was of course the location of Los Alamos, a major cog in the machine of the Manhattan Project, a gigantic, secret project that actually stayed secret, which was remarkable given the wide swath and numbers of people involved and the relatively simple security. But it was really important stuff (as Richard Feynman would say), and there was a life-and-death war on, a fight to the finish¹, a death struggle, so the importance of security—given the staggering consequences of its breach—was paramount^.2.

This letter of congratulation and support was written by President Franklin Roosevelt to J. Robert Oppenheimer, and sent to The Address of POB 1663.  It is an odd letter full of sleight, though it is obvious that Roosevelt knows exactly what is going on, and is just not acknowledging the elephant in the room.  And that “room” was at Oppenheimer & Co., Santa Fe, Box1663.  No scientific project had ever been bigger, then or (perhaps) since.  That’s a lot to cram into one post office box. 

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1. By the way, in describing this item from their collection the Library of Congress website understates WWII in a way that I don’t think I had ever seen before: 

“In the midst of World War II when the United States was engaged abroad in a major conflict with Germany and Japan, it was also working furiously at home toward the completion of the Manhattan Project..” A “major conflict”? I should say so, though “major conflict just doesn’t quite cover it, doesn’t nearly come close to describing what kind of “conflict” was going on.  Odd.  A very odd description. 

2. Given the vast, extraordinary amount of the resources consumed by this effort, I don’t think that the atomic bomb could’ve been produced by any other country at this time—I think that, materially speaking, it was an impossibility. 

*The fact was though that the place did seem to be a baby-maker, surpassing national averages, with roughly a fifth of all the married women on the base being pregnant in 1944.  See John Hunner’s Inventing Los Alamos for an interesting discussion of the baby topic. Babies and bombs and radioactive hell-mush in the foothills of the Sangre de Christo. 

Comments

[Jeff]

I wonder anyone has P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, nowadays? Or is it retired, hanging on a flag from the ceiling of the post office?

[John Ptak]

The POB address exists, seems to be a smallish state government drop.