Abstract
In the midst of World War II the USA embarked on the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. I focus on Los Alamos National Laboratory and on the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site), where assembly, maintenance, and testing of nuclear technologies were carried out. Historical and archaeological investigations have been ongoing in compliance with federal regulations, bringing to light architecture, facilities, and artifacts of the once-secret US government activities. This chapter summarizes research on the remains of the Manhattan Project and of Project Rover—the latter built a nuclear-thermal engine for spacecraft. Suggestions are offered for further research.
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Notes
- 1.
http://www.bikiniatoll.com/divetour1.html, accessed 6 March 2012.
- 2.
For a video of the demolition of R-MAD, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvC1rc3Sd4M, accessed 21 February 2012.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Colleen M. Beck and Harold Drollinger for supplying the Desert Research Institute reports on Project Rover facilities and W. Bruce Masse for guidance in obtaining the Los Alamos reports. Alan B. Carr of Los Alamos National Laboratory sent me a cornucopia of Project Rover images. I am especially grateful to Colleen Beck for recognizing early on the importance of “nuclear archaeology” and also for commenting on an earlier draft. I thank Alice Gorman for providing comments and corrections.
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Schiffer, M.B. (2013). The US Nuclear Establishment. In: The Archaeology of Science. Manuals in Archaeological Method, Theory and Technique, vol 9. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00077-0_11
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