McFeatters: Turn Manhattan Project sites into national parks
Major Theoadore "Dutch" Van Kirk, left, navigator of the "Enola Gay," walks through the Oak Ridge National Laboratory with Bill Wilcox, one of the original engineers on the Manhattan Project. Credit: AP, 2000
Too often in this country, where we tend to look forward rather than back, by the time we decide a site is historic enough to make it worth preserving, a shopping mall has taken its place.
So it's important that a bill working its way through Congress -- sponsored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) -- pass soon, before time does what the developers haven't.
The measure would confer national park status on national laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Hanford, Wash.; and Los Alamos, N.M.
To many youngsters, and maybe many not so young, the names may not mean much. But to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, they were instrumental in "the single most significant event of the 20th century": the control of atomic energy and the development of the atomic bomb.
At its peak, the code-named Manhattan Project employed 125,000 people and only a relative few actually knew what they were working on. Oak Ridge produced the enriched uranium; Hanford, the plutonium; and Los Alamos used the elements in assembling Little Boy and Fat Man. The two bombs destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but succeeded in bringing the war to a quicker and arguably less bloody conclusion.
The sites are largely off limits to tourists, although Oak Ridge offers tours during the summer. But, as The Washington Post notes, only about 1,500 people tour the site, even though it's on the doorstep of one of our most popular tourist attractions, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Research, almost entirely of the nonweapons variety, is still done at the three labs but the workforce is down to 32,000. Many of the buildings involved in the Manhattan Project were deteriorating and marked for demolition until preservationists intervened.
There will be arguments about the propriety of preserving the crucible for the creation of man's greatest weapon of mass destruction. But there is nothing to be gained by trying to erase, rewrite or sugarcoat history -- not if we are going to learn from it.
Dale McFeatters is a senior writer for the Scripps Howard News Service.
