(Slide 3) Los Alamos was a top secret lab, where almost everyone was either a physicist like me or a chemist. I was the head of the Laboratory, and lead my colleagues in many of our discoveries, including designs for the implosion type bomb. This city was built purely to house us and the laboratory where we worked on the design for the bomb. Everyone, including children, had to have identification cards with them, as our city  and mathematics for blast radius. was closely guarded by guards and as you can see in this photograph, there was a gate to get in and out. One of the hardest parts of being there is that no one could know I was there, or even that it existed. Many of my co-workers were unhappy with that, as they had family and friends at home to whom it seemed we had disappeared. While we were there, we made progress in the designing and how the exact chemistry would work when it fell out of the plane. And eventually, we did a field test. 

Slide 4: We drove 230 miles south from our base in Los Alamos into the desert of Alamogordo, and prepped “Trinity Site”. We built a 100 foot tower to drop the bomb from, and set up bases around the area, some beyond 40 miles. But we didn't know then that we would need them farther than that. Just before dawn, the bomb was detonated and the first nuclear mushroom cloud rose into the sky. Light was seen for 200 miles, and windows shattered for a hundred. For ½ a mile the ground was turned into a glass crater, green and highly radioactive. Our scientists from the project sat 27 miles away on blankets and watched as I can remember one of my colleagues saying, “ the atmosphere lit on fire”. Most of us didn't want them to drop the bomb, but president Truman said it was the only way to avoid a possible ½ million to a million deaths. But nearly that amount of Japanese citizens died. Questions on the testing at Trinity Site? (scripting Genre 2)

Slide 5: This was Hiroshima, which was followed by Nagasaki. (scripting Genre#3)

Me: A great question, young scholar. You will be finding out. In your teams of four, go to the back of the room. There you will find a map with four locations in the United states marked on it. Next to each location is a card that will direct you to one of the four cassette players, each with a different tape outlining one of the reasons they may or may not have chosen that location. It will then direct you to the next tape, until you will listen to all of them, make your final decision, and write it on the bottom of your student handout in the marked line. Correct answers will be announced at the end of the lesson, and will count points towards your test this Friday. You have 7 minutes. Go!

5 minutes! 

3 Minutes! 

1 minute! 

30 seconds, write your guesses and turn them in.

Done!

     ____, ___, and ______, you have the correct answer. The correct answer is one with a water supply, somewhat rural, somewhere with natural barriers and  somewhere hidden. Oak Ridge was 92 square miles of land bordering the Clinch River. It was tucked away in the Cumberland foothills, secret from anyone but the few farmers evicted from the land. It was home to 79,000 people who came to the promise of war-ending work and decent wages to get them out of the hole in their pocketbook from the Great Depression. Here was where they separated the much more common but useless U-238 from the fissionable 235. Only 7 in 1000 atoms could be used for the bomb, making getting the fuel a daunting task. 

Adobe Voice Scripts

     Illinois Site: There had to be enough room for the enormous factories the site would house, and for housing all of the workers. 79,000 people ended up living in the 90 square mile compound, and many more in surrounding towns, though they could tell no one what they did or what it looked like. The compound had to remain Top Secret, so there were billboards around the factories warning what would happen if it was found you were talking. Different voice: Listen to the cassette specified by The Connecticut site If you have not already.  

    

The Connecticut site: In order for our operation to be secret, no one could see what was going on inside of the compound, so the area around the plant had to be of prying eyes and loose lips. Other wise, we would lose our secrecy and the whole operation could be compromised by Soviet spies or even word could get back to the Nazis. Different voice:Listen to the cassette specified by The California Site If you have not already. 

    

 California Site:In case of things going horribly wrong at any of the plants, we wanted natural barriers around the site to keep possible fallout or radiation inside the area to lessen possible radiation poisoning and damage. The site chosen was protected by mountains on all sides to do this, and thankfully there was never a meltdown at any of the plants. Listen to the cassette specified by the Tennessee Site If you have not already. 

 

Tennessee Site: The site needed to be near a river to supply water for people in the compound and for the factories.Otherwise, the city could not be run and the factories could not produce the necessary elements of the bomb. The site was less than 8 miles from a winding river that supplied the necessary water for the factories, and those living on site. Please listen to the cassette specified by the  Illinois Site If you have not already. 

 

 
 Site 3
 
 https://voice.adobe.com/a/rJm5zjXf
 
 Site 2
 
 https://voice.adobe.com/a/rJHZXi7z
 
 Site 1
 
 https://voice.adobe.com/a/r1OdXiXz
 Site 4 
 
 https://voice.adobe.com/a/rk_jljQG