Voyage of Discoveries

Fascinating finds are down every aisle and around every corner of the National Security Research Center, the Lab’s classified library. In addition to housing classified reports, drawings, photographs, and other materials from some of history’s greatest scientific minds, the collections are filled with unclassified legacy materials dating back to World War II and the start of the nuclear enterprise.

These materials are often rediscovered as NSRC archivists work with today’s researchers to fulfill the Lab’s national security mission. Here are just a few of the latest exciting discoveries.

Rediscovered photographs of Oppenheimer’s 1964 visit to the Lab

While searching through other historical collections, NSRC archivist and historian John Moore came across over 130 black-and-white photographs of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s last visit to the Laboratory. Tucked away among the NSRC’s millions of classified and unclassified photographs, the images had not been seen for over 30 years.

Oppenheimer, who served as the Lab’s first director from 1943–1945, came back in May 1964 to deliver a lecture about Niels Bohr (a Nobel Prize–winning physicist) and visit the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory Museum (today’s Bradbury Science Museum), as captured in the photos. While the images center around Oppenheimer, they also include other Manhattan Project–era figures, like his wife Kitty Oppenheimer, Norris Bradbury and his wife Lois, and Oppenheimer’s former secretary Dorothy McKibbin.

Watch rare footage from the Trinity test Site

Immediately after the July 16, 1945, Trinity test—in which a team of Los Alamos scientists successfully detonated the world’s first atomic device in a remote section of New Mexico desert—its participants were faced with the hazardous task of entering the test area to collect and study radioactive particles from the explosion.

A seven-minute film from 1945 depicts the important role played by two Sherman tanks specially modified for this work, which included gathering soil samples remotely using rockets equipped with scoops. The film shows the rocket tank in action as well as a lead-lined tank that carried scientists—according to some accounts, Enrico Fermi among them—into the crater left behind by the nuclear blast.

A digital version of the film, made in 2017, was recently rediscovered by the NSRC Multimedia Digitization Services team and edited for clarity.

“The film depicts the ingenuity and inventiveness of staff to meet a critical need—the recovery of radioactive samples to assess the performance of the Trinity device,” said Lab historian Roger Meade. “The film also depicts safety measures—remote recovery and handling—to keep staff safe from radioactive exposures . . . [and] the rugged and primitive environment in which wartime staff worked.”

Watch footage of the Trinity test tanks at work.

“Bomb books”: essential nuclear test documents made available to researchers

The NSRC is currently uploading hundreds of “bomb books” into the Online Vault, a classified repository for weapons researchers. These one-of-a-kind compilations contain critical pieces of information on historic nuclear tests that researchers use for today’s mission work.

Bomb books can be anywhere from a few dozen to thousands of pages long, depending on the test and the amount of information preserved. The “one-stop-shop” packages enable researchers to more efficiently track down records, which may include schematics, photographs, assembly information, and valuable pre-shot documentation from the design and preparation stages.

Lab scientist Jim Hill, in the Theoretical division, says a well-prepared bomb book may contain drawings, material assays, and just about everything else a weapons analyst needs to model a test device and begin comparing computational results to the actual experiment. He added, “If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen. For me, the bomb books are the essence of writing it down.”