Their average age was twenty-five. They came from Berkley, Cambridge, Paris, London, Chicago, and arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, or at least resigned to it. But hope quickly turned to hardship as they were forced to adapt to a rugged military town where everything was a secret, including what their husbands were doing at the lab.
They lived in barely finished houses with a P.O. Box for an address, in a town wreathed with barbed wire, all for the benefit of 'the project' that didn't exist as far as the greater world was concerned. They were constrained by the words they couldn't say out loud, the letters they couldn't send home, the freedom they didn't have.
Though they were strangers, they joined together - adapting to a landscape as fierce as it was absorbing, and to an existence fluctuating between the banalities of everyday life and the drama of scientific discovery. And while the bomb was being created, babies were born, friendships were forged, children grew up, and Los Alamos gradually transformed from the site of an abandoned school into a real community. But the end of the war would bring even bigger challenges to the men and women of Los Alamos, as the scientists and their families struggled with the burden of their contribution towards developing the most destructive force in the history of mankind.
The Wives of Los Alamos is a window into one of the strangest and most monumental research projects in modern history, and is a testament to a remarkable group of women who carved out a life for themselves, in spite of the chaos and moral confusion of war.
