Atomic Albuquerque

Of course I didn't know that the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town had suffered a computer failure during the night so there wasn't any record of our reservation showing on their booking system. However a modicum of British charm coupled with being able to show my reservation and booked rate on my Mac once the hotel had given me access to their guest WiFi system (and I saved the logon and password details for 'complimentary' use later on) gave us a very nice room on the 10th floor of a fairly up-market hotel with a nice view over the Old Town and museum area when eventually we got into our room in the afternoon. Albuquerque's Old Town is not that dissimilar to Santa Fe's only nicer. Mostly single storey adobe buildings housing restaurants and shops we found an interesting photographic co-operative's gallery where we bought a very nice picture and could have bought many others. Before we walked into Old Town we stopped in the museum area and went into the Atomic Museum. This is a museum devoted to the story of the atom, to the history of radiation in treatment of disease as well as Marie Curie and X-rays but the main focus of the displays is to explain the birth of the atomic bomb and that Manhattan Project which was based in Los Alamos about 60 or 70 miles away. What made everything more interesting were the volunteers who walk round the museum talking to visitors. These are men in their 70s and 80s who had been involved in one aspect or other of the US atomic programme at different times in the past and who are only too willing to talk about there experiences. The man who took our entrance money had specialised in decontamination procedures and the one and only time he might have been able to use his expertise was in 1966 when a B-52 carrying four nuclear weapons crashed during mid air refuelling over the Mediterranean near Los Palomares in Spain. The B-52 and the refuelling plane crashed into the sea and the problem was how to recover the nuclear weapons and to remove earth contaminated with plutonium from the area. He was part of a training program in the US at the time and however much he pleaded he told us he wasn't permitted to go to Spain to help in the clean up. Another elderly man had been involved in the building of nuclear power plants in the USA and he showed us a replica of a tiny uranium slug that he carried round in his pocket that demonstrated, so he said, the quantity of uranium needed to produce the equivalent energy that a ton and a half of coal would generate.
But the two highlights of the museum for us at least were first, the replica casings of the Tall Man bomb that was dropped over Nagasaki and the Fat Boy bomb dropped over Hiroshima in 1945. Whilst big, neither are massive - perhaps 500lbs or so - but to be so close to potential obliteration was disturbing. On the same theme another veteran there told us that the famous Hiroshima bomber, Enola Gay, was named after the pilot's mother. The second was to read the news sheets that were typed out and then duplicated so as to be read by those people who were working at Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project. Besides the minutiae of life on a military base - who had lost this or who had found that - was a simple two line announcement of a 'Hebrew Sabbath Service' to be held in one of the theatres at the camp starting at 7.30pm on a Friday night in July, 1944. Who of the scientists and servicemen in Los Alamos had gone to that service? What part had they played in the world changing events of 1945?