Inside the top-secret Tunnel Vault sat a wooden desk — but why?

In a remote Los Alamos canyon, the Tunnel Vault at Technical Area 41 (TA-41) was built shortly after the Manhattan Project for post-WWII nuclear stockpile storage and Cold War weapons development. In its time, it was one of the most highly protected facilities in the United States.

Today, the Tunnel Vault is one of the Laboratory’s “exceptionally significant historical properties,” and videos of it went viral in 2013 after it was declassified.

About halfway down the tunnel is a side room that was used for early development of unclassified research that led to the discovery of the solar neutrino — work that later won a Nobel Prize in physics. This lab space was ideal for the work because it's buried 300 feet underground.

Who wrote on this desk?

Properties such as this gem are managed for preservation by the Historic Buildings Program in the Lab’s Environmental Stewardship Division. In 2015, staff members discovered a small and unassuming wooden desk in the Tunnel Vault and tagged it for the Bradbury.

The desk is compelling not because it’s unspeakably rare, or because it played a pivotal role in great scientific discovery (that we know of), but because of where it was found — in the Tunnel Vault.

The diminutive desk certainly presented more than a few questions:

• Had the desk been there for decades, witnessing one scientific discovery after the next?
• Was research that led to the discovery of the solar neutrino written upon it?
• Or was it a cast-off, warehoused there from another facility?

Props for creating 'period-authentic context'

The Museum has been a collecting institution since 1953. Donated artifacts either find a home in our gallery exhibits, are loaned to other museums and Lab partners, or wait quietly in the Museum’s warehouse for their time in the spotlight. 

But this wooden desk — and two others just like it retrieved from other buildings — aren’t the usual artifacts.

“I have, in my collections storage, three of these identical desks. They were delivered by LANL’s Historic Buildings team to the Bradbury for storage among the artifacts, but they aren’t accessioned the same way that, for instance, Oppie’s chair is,” says Collections Specialist Wendy Strohmeyer. “The intention for these desks, and some other furniture and fixtures from the Historic Buildings team, is to use them to create period-authentic context for other true artifacts.”

For instance, some furniture and fixtures, including the wooden desk, may be used in recreations of Manhattan Project National Historical Park (MPNHP) sites in Los Alamos, giving MPNHP tour-goers a feel for the times.