I've been to Los Alamos. It's beautiful. It's a stunningly beautiful mountainous city filled with a slew of pompous, entitled eggheads and their equally pompous, entitled spawn. I've been to the Trinity Site, ground zero, on one of the two days a year it's open to the public.
When I was a child, I went on elementary school field trips to the Sandia Atomic Museum on Kirtland Airforce Base. After wandering around looking at various exhibits and replicas of Fat Man and Little Boy, we would sit outside beneath decommissioned missiles and eat sandwiches from our sack lunches.
On 9/11, Kirtland Air Force Base security was ratcheted up and the museum necessarily closed. After a time it was moved to a temporary home near Old Town. Ten months ago the museum was renamed the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History and it reopened in a new home in the southeast part of the city.
Today Dave and I went there to see what we could see.
This was one of the things we saw:
"Little Boy" replica, New Mexico
Four years ago, I was in Hiroshima, at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum there, and this is one of the things I saw:
"Little Boy" replica, Hiroshima
I wrote about my visit to Hiroshima, posted pictures of my visit there and to the Peace Memorial Museum, but there's something I never told you about Hiroshima.
One of my coworkers in Tokyo, a charming young woman named Chie, was from Hiroshima. Chie's family were rice farmers, but during the war her grandfather, then a young man, worked at the Hiroshima train station. Chie told me that on the morning of August 6, 1945, her grandfather was a few minutes late to work. As punishment, he was sent by himself to clean the tracks on the opposite side of the station from where his friends were working. He was feeling pretty low that morning because he couldn't be with his friends. When Little Boy was detonated above the city, the station shielded Chie's grandfather from the worst of it. He survived; all of his friends died.
I could never think of what to say to Chie about that except that I was sorry.
I wrote about my visit to Hiroshima, posted pictures of my visit there and to the Peace Memorial Museum, but there's something I never told you about Hiroshima.
One of my coworkers in Tokyo, a charming young woman named Chie, was from Hiroshima. Chie's family were rice farmers, but during the war her grandfather, then a young man, worked at the Hiroshima train station. Chie told me that on the morning of August 6, 1945, her grandfather was a few minutes late to work. As punishment, he was sent by himself to clean the tracks on the opposite side of the station from where his friends were working. He was feeling pretty low that morning because he couldn't be with his friends. When Little Boy was detonated above the city, the station shielded Chie's grandfather from the worst of it. He survived; all of his friends died.
I could never think of what to say to Chie about that except that I was sorry.
2 comments:
A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to visit both Los Alamos and Hiroshima in the space of a couple of months. I was struck by the different way the replicas of the bombs were displayed: in Los Alamos, they were brightly lit and at floor level, whereas at the Peace Museum they were shadowy and positioned up high. Very different in the emotional impact.
yes, I found that there was a much different feel to each museum. Subjective/objective perhaps? I don't know. For me, it was part native/foreign.
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