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	A-Bomb City Los Alamos, New Mexico (population 12,000) was created virtually over night on a remote mesa by the US government during World War II in order to develop the atomic bomb. Within only 27 months and under great secrecy Los Alamos went from breaking ground to rolling out two nuclear bombs for export to Japan. These two atomic bombs, “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, were dropped by B29 bombers first on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 and then three days later on Nagasaki. Both cities were utterly destroyed with over 200,000 people dying within days. Some claim that these two nuclear bombs ended the war early and thus prevented the need for a conventional land invasion of Japan. In such an invasion an estimated one million US troops would have been causalities, with even more Japanese casualties. However, others now believe that the Japanese had come to realize the war was futile and were nearing surrender. Thus they believe the use of the atomic bombs was unnecessary. The project to develop the atomic bomb, which also involved top secret installations in other areas of the US was known as the “Manhattan Project“. [View as slideshow] 12 ► Today Los Alamos is home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which continues to be a premier national security research institution. Its primary responsibility is ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of the US nuclear weapons program. However the Laboratory claims to also help curb a wide variety of threats to U.S. interestsâ€” such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the spread of deadly diseases, inadequate supplies of energy, or the effects of climate change. It hosts the world’s most powerful hybrid supercomputer built by IBM for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Los Alamos National Lab. It can perform 1.02 quadrillion calculations per second. It gets its power from 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engine(TM) processors — derived from chips that power today’s most popular videogame consoles. Next Stop – Beautiful Northern New Mexico This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under New Mexico. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Leave a Reply Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website