| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community. By Jon Hunner. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. xi + 288 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

Los Alamos, New Mexico, is the western town most closely associated with the development of nuclear weapons. Historians have paid considerable attention to its scientists and their contributions to the creation of the atomic bomb. Inventing Los Alamos adopts a different approach by focusing mainly on the evolution of community during the period 1943–1957. By combining documentary research with interviews with the men, women, and children who lived on "the Hill," Jon Hunner highlights the voices and agency of diverse townspeople. He traces the changes in Los Alamos from its incorporation into the Manhattan Project through the initial decade of the Cold War. He pays particular attention to the town's utopian image, the experiences of families in such an atypical setting, and the ways that residents coped with the tensions and opportunities inherent in an emerging "atomic culture." Hunner regularly cuts away from the local story to depict key moments in the early development of nuclear weapons—the Trinity test, Pacific Ocean tests, Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb, and so on. Each of these events had repercussions for Los Alamos. Jumping ahead from the 1950s, the final chapter offers a snapshot of the town surviving the end of the Cold War.

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