WHO WERE BEFORE the war was still who we were during, and after. Somewhere inside we were still twenty-five, still feisty, emboldened, a riot.
BUT WE WERE changed.
WE LEFT AND lectured on atomic energy. We left and wrote autobiographies about life on the Hill. In our memoirs we reported that at Los Alamos there were no unemployed people, no in-laws, no invalids, no poor, and no sidewalks. Our memoirs suggested we knew nothing about what our husbands were building and we were accused of exaggerating how little we knew. But if other wives knew something, they did not tell those secrets to the rest of us, mostly.
WE LEFT AND many things turned atomic: there was talk of nuclear power generators to replace coal and oil, and that we could sanitize our vegetables by irradiating them. Home furnishings became atomic, too—we bought clocks with rays and spheres showing the path of electrons around the nuclei of atoms.
WE LEFT AND founded organizations that opposed nuclear weapons. We continued atomic research, we become social workers, we became grandmothers, we became blacklisted. From an essay Robert published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists many years later we learned what had happened that Christmas Eve we saw him leaving in a rush: when it became clear that the Germans had abandoned their bomb project, and after overhearing the General say the bomb was being built to show Russia what the U.S. could do, Robert asked permission to leave and return to Britain. He became the only scientist to leave the project for reasons of conscience. Robert asked in his essay, as we also wondered: Why did others not leave, too?
OUR HUSBANDS WERE curious. They wanted to know if their theoretical predictions could become a physical reality. They thought thousands of lives would be saved by a quick end to the war. Or perhaps they did not want to take a position because they feared how it might negatively affect their careers. Robert left and used his knowledge of physics to research the biological effects of radiation. He left and argued that all scientific research should be for the benefit for humanity, and that scientists cannot keep scientific curiosity and moral implications separate no matter how difficult it might be to predict how such discoveries might later be used.
OUR HUSBANDS FLEW to the Marshall Islands and we called them the Bikini scientists. A navy official told Chief Juda, We are testing these bombs for the good of mankind, and to end all world wars. Juda understood the word, mankind, from the Bible and replied, If it is in the name of God, I am willing to let my people go. Marshallese were told they would be able to return after the bombs were dropped but their homes, bicycles, and bathtubs became radioactive. Though they could not return, the radioactivity was fodder for scientific research.
MEANWHILE, WE WERE featured in Mademoiselle. We went to work for the FBI. We wrote textbooks, led high school physics programs, became president of women’s universities, divorced. We made pineapple upside-down cake for the first time in years.
WE LEFT AND moved to places where air raid sirens blared, where we dropped and covered, where we feared someone else would use what our husbands first developed on us and we practiced drills to move our families quickly into nuclear fallout shelters.
WE LEFT AND said the Hill was an anthill and the bomb was its queen. But many of us told everyone, when we got back to civilian life, There was no crime at all in Los Alamos. We all kept our doors unlocked. It was the safest place to raise a family.
WE LEFT HAPPY, we left relieved, we left thinking we had been a part of something unique, we left with doubts about our husbands, or about ourselves, or our country, or all of these, or none of it. We left wanting most what we had once had in the middle of the howling night, our friends: Louise, Starla, Margaret, Ingrid. We left pregnant, we left tired, we left, in some ways, just as we arrived: dusty and in need of a shampoo.