Talk:Los Alamos National Laboratory

Comment on an excellent article

Milton, you are irrepressible, another outstanding piece of work. I could hardly find a place for a comma.

In section 1.2, Post World War II, where you describe the development and testing of the Super, the reader gets no sense of the role of LANL in that development and testing, and subsequent activities related to the H-Bomb. At least I did not.

It's not important, but I missed not seeing reference to General Leslie Groves, though he's certainly covered in Silent Voices on the Bibliography subpage.

Re External Links, consider: atomicarchive.com. A section therein says:

"LANL was created in 1943 to serve as a secret laboratory dedicated to research, development, and construction of nuclear weapons. Facilities include plutonium and tritium processing plants, an eight megawatt research reactor and various laser and high explosives buildings. Until April 1984, Los Alamos had the capability to fabricate and assemble nuclear weapon test devices." here.

Great work. Anthony.Sebastian 02:58, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the review, Anthony. At your suggestion, I added this sentence into section 1.2: "LANL played a major role in the design and construction of the thermonuclear test devices and bombs." I also added a link to the www.atomicarchive.com website, again as you suggested.

As for General Groves, I just don't think his role was as important, by far, as that of the physicists at Los Alamos. His job consisted of having Army engineers construct the site buildings and infrastructure and to maintain the secrecy of what was going on. As it turned out, he did a poor job of maintaining the secrecy ... the Soviet spies at Los Alamos (Klaus Fuchs and others) passed on almost everything the Soviets needed. Anyhow, he is mentioned often enough in many of the main article references as well as in the Bibligraphy items. Milton Beychok

comments per Milton's request

Good job! Overall an excellent summary. Two comments, one important and one less important. The trivial one is that I would move the second bomb photo over to the right like the preceding two photos; this is just cosmetic, but I find it visually less jarring during reading when the photos are over on one side so my eyes don't have to do a sidewinder kind of thing. The second, most important impression is, that I think the introduction would benefit from being more dramatic. I believe in first impressions, when writing. I mean, LA is THE PLACE, one of the historic places where a historic event came down, and incidentally it's still pretty cool. Right now, it reads like "Here's a place, managed by so and so (never heard of them)." Whereas the initial impact could be more like "This is the place where the first nuke was developed in great secrecy during WWII, and nowadays it has evolved into a very important center for all kinds of scientific research." I'd be glad to make a stab at actually writing a first sentence for you, but it might be more fun if you did it your way. I'm just trying to give the emotional impact that the very first sentence of this article could have. Like a good resume, I tend either to quit reading right away, or, if I'm gripped up, read the whole darn thing.Pat Palmer 19:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Another minor thing: the org chart is time sensitive. Chances are, in 2 years, they'll have it completely turned upside down. Voice of experience here after 15 years in Bell Laboratories. So I would be sure and put as "as of 2011" on there somewhere.Pat Palmer 19:09, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Now I've got the neurons firing. How many folks work there today? Are there other, somewhat comparable, Nat'l Labs (Oak Ridge, TN maybe)? What kind of federal budget outlay lies behind running such a facility? Why is it's running outsourced? (they all do that now). These might be answered in there; I'll admit I rushed through it.Pat Palmer 19:12, 7 June 2011 (UTC)