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(PD) Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Aerial view of Los Alamos National Laboratory as of 1995

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Since 2005, it has been managed and operated by Los Alamos National Security (LANS) and is one of the world's leading science and technology institutes.

LANL's primary mission is to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the nation's nuclear deterrent. In addition to its primary mission, LANL's research work serves to advance bioscience, chemistry, computer science, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics disciplines.

At various times in the past, LANL has been known as Site Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, and Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

History

World War II and the Manhattan Project

(PD) Photo: Berlyn Brixner
Trinity test of an atomic bomb on July 15, 1945 at 0.016 seconds after detonation. The fireball was about 200 metres wide.

The Manhattan Project was the secret United States project conducted primarily during World War II, with the participation of the United Kingdom and Canada, that culminated in developing the world's first nuclear weapon commonly referred to at that time as an atomic bomb.

The project was initiated in 1939 by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after he received a letter from physicist Albert Einstein (drafted by fellow physicist Leó Szilárd) urging the study of nuclear fission for military purposes, under fears that Nazi Germany would be first to develop nuclear weapons. Roosevelt started a small investigation into the matter which eventually became the massive Manhattan Project that employed more than 130,000 people at universities across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada as well as at the three major design, development and production facilities at:

• The weapons design and development facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico known then as Site Y, later to become the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and now the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• The plutonium production facility at the Hanford Site in eastern Washington state.
• The uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

President Roosevelt died in mid-April 1945 and was succeeded by President Harry S. Truman, just a few weeks before the war against Germany and Italy in Europe ended in May 1945.

The Manhattan project culminated with the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, known as the Trinity test, in July 1945 at White Sands, New Mexico. Since Japan was still waging an aggressive war in the Pacific, President Truman decided to use atomic bombs on the Japsnese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bombs were dropped by air on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The Japanese surrendered shortly thereafter (August 14, 1945) and the war in the Pacific ended. A formal surrender ceremony took place aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945.

Post World War II

As soon as the war ended, many of the scientists returned to their prewar universities. However, a short four years later, the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb in August 1949. That event was viewed by the United States and its allies as a new peril facing the world and intensified the era of mutual distrust and antagonism between the Soviet Union and the United States that became known as the Cold War which lasted until 1991.

The atomic bombs that had been developed by the end of 1949 were based on the energy released by nuclear fission reactions or, more simply, the splitting of atoms. Some research had already begun at the Los Alamos site by physicists Hans Bethe and Edward Teller as well as mathematician Stanislaw Ulam on what became known as thermonuclear weapons (also referred to as Hydrogen bombs or H-bombs. Thermonuclear weapons are based on the energy released by nuclear fusion reactions or, more simply, the fusion of atoms.

A thermonuclear weapon generate vastly more energy, per unit of weight of the physical weapon, than does a pure fission bomb. In January of 1950, faced with the fact that the Soviet Union had successfully detonated an atomic bomb, President Truman announced that the United States was going to develop thermonuclear weapons of all kinds.

LANL Organization

LANL is led by a Director and a Deputy Director assisted by an Executive Director and an Executive Office Manager. As shown in the organization chart below, five operating divisions, each headed by a Principal Associate Director, report to the Director's office:

(PD) Chart: Los Alamos National Laboratory
LANL Organization Chart

In addition, these twelve administrative functions report to the Director's office:

Audits & Ethics Director Community Programs Office Chief Prime Contracts Office of Equal Opportunity and & Diversity Ombudsman Office Government & Community Affairs

Contractor Assurance Office Chief Information Security Officer Chief Information Officer General Counsel Chief Financial Officer LANS, LLC Executive Staff Director

Personnel and operating costs

As of May 2011, there were a total of 11,782 personnel in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with the following breakdown:

• 9,685 Los Alamos National Security (LANS) personnel
• 477 contract guard force personnel
• 524 personnel working for various other contractors
• 1,116 students

The operating costs for the fiscal year of 2010 was about $2,000,000,000 with the following breakdown:

• 51% for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) weapons programs
• 8% for nonproliferation programs
• 11% for environmental management programs
• 4% for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science
• 5% for energy and other programs
• 6% for safeguards and security
• 15% for other work

Participation in collaborative programs

LANL participates in a number of collaborative programs such as:

• The LANL's Center for Nonlinear Studies, in conjunction with the University of New Mexico and others, organizes the annual International q-bio Conference on Cellular Information Processing held at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The annual conferences are intended to advance predictive modeling of cellular regulation. The emphasis is on modeling and quantitative experimentation for understanding and predicting the behaviors of regulatory systems that occur in many biological systems, as well as the general principles of cellular information processing.

• The Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, California, supported by the DOE Office of Science, combines the expertise of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as well as the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama to provide fundamental data on key genes that may link to biological functions including microbial metabolic pathways and enzymes used to generate fuel molecules, affect plant biomass formation, degrade contaminants, or capture carbon dioxide (CO₂).

• LANL operates one of the three National High Magnetic Field Laboratories (NHMFL) in collaboration with two other sites located at the Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida and the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. The NHMFL operates state-of-the-art, high-magnetic field facilities for researchers and engineers. High magnetic fields are important to fundamental research in a diverse range of disciplines including biology, biochemistry, bioengineering, chemistry, engineering, geochemistry, materials science, medicine and physics.