Saturday, June 3, 2017, Museum of Nuclear Science

It makes sense there would be a Museum of Nuclear Science and History in New Mexico. After all, the desert southwest is where they developed and tested the first atomic bomb.

Below, I am standing next to the Navy's Terrier missile. It was their shipboard mainstay anti-aircraft defense for many years. During my employment in the late 70's at General Dynamics, I worked on the Standard Missile, the modernized replacement for the Terrier. There was nothing nuclear about this missile, so it must have been in front of the museum just because it looked cool.

Inside, the focus was on the events surrounding the development of atomic energy. There was a lot of history of the top-secret facility at Los Alamos during the 1940's. I liked the recreation of several of the labs where early experiments tried to extract energy by splitting heavy elements into two or more lighter elements plus some liberated energy. We call the process fission. Of course, with World War II being waged by Japan and Germany, most of the effort was directed towards weapons development.

We learned many of the key scientists on the project had earlier escaped from Germany. I did not know how close Germany was to developing atomic energy and the bomb. They had something very close to our Manhattan project but could never create a sustained chain reaction. History would have been radically different if some of those very important minds had not fled to the states before the war started.

The secrecy around the entire project was amazing given the number of people involved and the number of operations scattered all across the country.

There were two competing designs to create an atomic explosion. The implosion type required a test to make sure it would work. The "Gadget" was assembled and detonated at the Trinity test site on July 16th, 1945.

After that successful test, they built the Fat Man, the name given to the first implosion-type bomb. Its detonation over Nagasaki on August 9th, 1945 with an explosive yield of 20 kilotons directly led to the end of the war. The museum had a B-29 and a replica of Fat Man outdoors.

Things were quickly improved and it was not long before the start of the cold war with the concept of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) as the basis of East-West relations for many years. B-52's routinely flew with nuclear bombs on board, so retaliation was always only moments away.

Warhead yields increased into the megaton range - about 500 times more powerful than Fat Man.

Eventually, the aging B-52s were augmented by Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) and warheads became smaller until a single ICBM carried an arsenal of Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs).

There were small yield weapons that could be cannon launched and the Navy even had nuclear warheads in anti-submarine munitions. I am happy to say I was blissfully unaware of any of this as I grew up.

There were a lot of informational displays discussing the development of nuclear power generation beginning with the first Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR-1). We visited EBR-1 several years ago in Idaho and highly recommend a visit.

The Museum of Nuclear Science would not be complete without a replica of Doc Brown's "Mr. Fusion" powered DeLorean time machine.