National Register Listing

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory

Central Ave., Los Alamos, NM

Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory was founded on January 1, 1943, on the Parajito Plateau in the Jemez Mountains northwest of Santa Fe to develop an instrument of war, the nuclear fission bomb. Successful in that task, LASL undertook a second assignment—the creation of a "super" weapon deriving energy from the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen. This mission, too, was successful. Since that time the Laboratory has continued to be the nation's foremost development center for nuclear weapons. More than 90% of the fission and fusion warheads now in American stockpiles are LASL devices. The other half of LASL's history—the nonmilitary half—is equally impressive. Ever since 1943, the Laboratory has been making contributions to fundamental scientific knowledge and peaceful applications of atomic energy. The world's first enriched-uranium reactor was designed and built at Los Alamos, where it has been in operation since 1944. The world's first plutonium-fueled reactor went into operation at Los Alamos in 1946. This was also the world's first fast-neutron reactor. In more recent years the Laboratory has developed a reactor using uranium phosphate fuel and another using molten plutonium, both for the first time anywhere. Several rocket propulsion reactors have been built and ground tested, with flight tests scheduled in the next few years. The Laboratory continues to be a leader in many other peaceful fields, including chemistry and metallurgy, biology and medicine, thermionic electricity, plasma physics, instrument development, and electronic computing.

History

The remote area selected in 1942 for the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, as it was to become known, was the Los Alamos (The Poplars) Mesa of the Parjarito (Little Bird) Plateau, a 7,300-foot-high, pine-forested shelf of the Jemez Mountains 35 miles northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The mesa, aside from a few isolated ranches and homesteads nearby, was occupied only by the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. Here, in some 50 log buildings, the Ranch School since 1918 had conducted for 40 to 50 boys a secondary and preparatory school with ranching, camping, riding, and other outdoor recreations. Behind the selection of this remote area for scientific research there had swiftly developed a series of events of worldwide importance.

Local significance of the district:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1966.