Oak Ridge

My family takes trips to the mountains in East Tennessee:  at least every year, sometimes two or three times a year for vacations.  On the way, we pass Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Los Alamos and the test sites in the Southwestern desert or the South Pacific are familiar to those who have only had a brief introduction to the Cold War arms race.  What is often forgotten in these conventional representations is that the arms race, at least at the beginning, took place not in a wasteland but in the heartland.  The men and women who went to work there were not surrounded by desert or ocean but by everyday America.  Their work was not a detached theoretical experiment in an isolated environment, but had very real, immediately visible consequences.  These people all had unique stories—although they were linked by their work, the experiences and memories and defined them gave them their individuality.  That can’t be found in a history book; it’s the sort of thing that comes from diaries and letters, the unique product of the individual rather than the homogenized output of an academic project.  That is what must not be lost.

Sources:

The Cold War