Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratories

Perhaps one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century, Robert Oppenheimer led the effort to produce the atomic bomb in the 1940s. This is a copy of his security badge from the Manhattan Project, circa 1943.

Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratories

Robert Oppenheimer (left) oversees the final assembly of a device scientists called "the gadget." It was the world's first atomic device, exploded in a test at the Trinity Site in southern New Mexico in 1945. Soon afterward, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending World War II.

Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratories

Manhattan Project officials examine the devastation left after the Trinity Site explosion. Oppenheimer (third from left) and Gen. Leslie Groves (center) led the effort to build an atomic bomb, though Oppenheimer later expressed deep concerns about what the nuclear age would mean for both the United States and the world.

Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratories

Oppenheimer talks with senior Los Alamos scientists Eric Jette (left) and Charles Critchfield (center) at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist, but his gift was being able to organize. "Oppenheimer was very good at recruiting bright, young scientists to work with him," says scientist John Hopkins. "They built the first bomb in less than three years — that's absolutely incredible."

Photo by Charlotte Hill CobbTribune

Tribune

Location of Robert Oppenheimer's cabin and ranch in the Pecos Wilderness.

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PECOS WILDERNESS — Wind rushing through mountain passes carries the scent of pine needles to the doorstep of the remote cabin in the mountains of northern New Mexico.

In front of a rutted, rocky path is a deep-red sign that tells visitors: "No Smoking."

The irony is inescapable. This place, this cabin, sparked New Mexico's technological future — and its link to the biggest fireball in the history of man.

It's the place where Robert Oppenheimer, father of the nuclear bomb, found peace, quiet and beauty as well as a nearby home for a project that would change the world.

If the prominent nuclear physicist hadn't fallen in love with the landscape as a young man in the 1920s and later pushed the U.S. government to build the first nuclear weapon there, New Mexico would be a decidedly different place, probably one without national laboratories or a nuclear waste depository.

A state with an entirely different economy.

All because of a three-room cabin and one stunning view.

"This would be an agricultural state, without a doubt," said Van Romero, New Mexico Tech's vice president for research and economic development.

"It seems the Nevadas and Arizonas and New Mexicos of the world each found a niche to push their economies along, and for us, that was the Manhattan Project. That's driven our economy for a long time and will continue for a long time in the future."

To many, Oppenheimer's love of the rural landscape — the high desert white pine trees, the rocky swirling of the Pecos River in the valley below — has changed the state so profoundly. New Mexico now is known as much for its science and technology as its slow pace and beauty.

Oppenheimer's ripple effects are significant. The Manhattan Project spawned Los Alamos National Laboratory, which spurred the construction in Albuquerque of Sandia National Laboratories, which together helped fuel the military-related economy of the northern half of New Mexico.

In the process, the area went from rural to technological, with Los Alamos still supporting much of the economy in the northern part of the state, said Larry Waldman, a senior research scientist at the University of New Mexico's Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

"The impact of Los Alamos is pretty significant, with about 10,000 high-paying jobs — and at least another 10,000 created from those," Waldman said. "It's really an essential part of the northern New Mexico economy. Towns like Española would go in the tank if the lab packed up."

The effect has been significant on the entire state, as well, considering the labs and other Department of Energy and Department of Defense work in New Mexico make up about 25 percent of the state's total economic output, said Heather Balas, president of New Mexico First, a public advocacy organization.

In fiscal 2003, when the nonprofit, nonpartisan group gathered data on the topic, federal spending in New Mexico was $18.7 billion, with $5.8 billion going to the labs and other defense contractors, she said.

As Oppenheimer's work transformed the state's economy, he also helped northern New Mexico's Hispanic and American Indian populations find higher-paying jobs in the sciences, said MaryElla Lopez Buckland, 81, who grew up in Las Vegas, N.M., and moved to Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

"When I was a kid, Hispanics going into science was talked about very little," Buckland said.

"At that time, most Hispanics went into teaching or the humanities," said Buckland, who lives at Oppenheimer Place in Los Alamos. "Now, though, a lot more Hispanics are getting degrees in the sciences. My nephew went to Cal Tech and is an engineer. Many of the children of my generation went into the sciences."

Still, 85 years after his arrival in New Mexico, Oppenheimer's influence is not without controversy.

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, an anti-nuclear organization, said the net effect of Oppenheimer and the nuclear age has been negative.

"To this day, New Mexico remains mired in the priorities of the Cold War and the nuclear complex," Mello said.

"I think our universities would have been better without it, because the state's technology attention would have been focused there rather than the federal labs. The thought would have been that the university system would be a major part of our economic growth — rather than our state ending up reliant on the federal government for many jobs."

All this, because of a love of a windy, rustic landscape and a cabin home.

An enchanted journey

Oppenheimer first came to the Land of Enchantment in 1922 after graduating from the Ethical Culture School, an upper-class, intellectual Jewish high school in New York.

He had been ill — as the lanky, nervous scientist often was during his life — and a friend from school brought him to the area with the goal of toughening him up.

Oppenheimer quickly got hooked on horseback riding and hiking in the Pecos landscape near the small village of Cowles, where his family ended up leasing the cabin in 1928 and eventually buying it in the late '40s.

"He thought New Mexico was absolutely the best place in the world," said Priscilla Duffield, who met Oppenheimer when he was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and came to New Mexico with him as his secretary during the Manhattan Project.

"When I met him at Berkeley, he had just come back from a trip to New Mexico," Duffield said. "And he said he'd just been to the most beautiful place in the world."

Whenever he came to the area, Oppenheimer and his brother, Frank, would travel on long, somewhat ill-advised horseback riding trips with no food, which is likely how Oppenheimer discovered the Los Alamos Ranch School, the future site of the secret laboratory, Duffield said.

He returned to the Pecos Wilderness on several occasions through his scholastic career, when he went to Harvard University, the University of Cambridge in England and the Georg-August-Universitat in Gottingen, Germany — and continued to make trips to the Land of Enchantment after he became a professor at both the California Institute of Technology and the University of California.

In one letter from Harvard in February 1923, Oppenheimer expressed his jealousy at a friend who was traveling to New Mexico.

According to the book "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections," edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, he wrote:

"Of course I am insanely jealous. I see you riding down from the mountains to the desert at that hour when thunderstorms and sunsets caparison the sky; I see you in the Pecos in September, when I'll want my friends to comfort me, you know, spending the moonlight on Grass Mountain."

Skills and emotions

In 1942, when Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves began hunting for a site to build the nation's first national laboratory, he saw an opportunity to spend more time in a state he loved.

But to some, his presence wasn't as much of a secret as the military might have hoped.

Already a well-known physicist, Oppenheimer found his presence at the school on a Scouting trip with another famous physicist, E.O. Lawrence, did not go entirely unnoticed by the student population, said Stirling Colgate, a former lab scientist and New Mexico Tech president who was a student at the Los Alamos Ranch School when it was taken over by the Army.

"We saw these two scientists, one wearing a porkpie hat and one wearing a fedora, and they had the euphemisms of being 'Mr. Smith' and 'Mr. Jones,' " Colgate recalled, noting Oppenheimer's famed porkpie hat and Lawrence's famed fedora.

"It took us less than an hour to recognize in our physics books that one was Oppenheimer, the great theoretical physicist of our age, and the other was E.O. Lawrence, the great shaker of the nuclear project. We, of course, knew then that they were taking over the school to make a nuclear bomb."

The thought of building a nuclear weapon was "the burning question of the age if you were a nerd at that time, which we were," Colgate said.

But making it happen — putting together a project rapidly so that a bomb could be used in World War II, was quite a feat, said John Hopkins, a retired applied physicist who worked at Los Alamos shortly after Oppenheimer's tenure.

"When Los Alamos was selected, they didn't have any idea how large and extensive it was going to be — Oppenheimer thought it would be maybe 100 people," Hopkins said. "It was vastly more complicated than Oppenheimer thought when he was working at Berkeley."

The lab ended up with more like 3,000 people when it started, Hopkins said.

Today, Los Alamos National Laboratory has 12,000 employees.

Oppenheimer's genius — besides in the area of theoretical physics — was in his teaching ability and his ability to manage a large group of people with a variety of personalities and specialties, Hopkins said.

"Oppenheimer was very good at recruiting bright, young scientists to work with him," Hopkins said. "They built the first bomb in less than three years — that's absolutely incredible."

Keeping a group like that together required an odd assortment of talents — and Oppenheimer has been somewhat of a role model for many lab directors across the complex, said C. Paul Robinson, the former director of Sandia National Laboratories.

"I often described my own job as a lab director as the king of an anarchy," Robinson said. "I think Oppenheimer was the first to get people like that organized and motivated."

For those living in New Mexico at the time, the Trinity explosion near Alamogordo — the detonation that marked the first nuclear test on July 16, 1945 — went relatively unnoticed.

The headline of the front page story in The Albuquerque Tribune said: "Munitions Explode at Alamo Dump." It described an accidental munitions explosion at the Alamogordo Air Base in southern New Mexico that could be seen as far away as Gallup.

For his part, the explosion of the first nuclear weapon made Oppenheimer think of the line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds," he told reporters several years later.

Oppenheimer stepped down from the lab after the war and spent a few weeks at the Pecos cabin before resuming his teaching career.

According to "Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections," in a letter from Pecos to a friend from Harvard on Aug. 27, 1945, he seemed to be wrestling with his conscience:

"We are at that ranch now, in an earnest but not too sanguine search for sanity. It ought to be, but it isn't, like the spring days when the paving would make a tentative show through the slush of Mt. Auburn St. There would seem to be some great headaches ahead."

In the following years he opposed the creation of much more powerful hydrogen bombs, which might have led to the Atomic Energy Commission's decision to take away his security clearance in 1954 amid charges that he was a Communist.

Many people who knew Oppenheimer after that said the decision sucked the life out of him.

Oppenheimer's last public visit to Los Alamos was in May 1964, when he gave a talk about the importance for open and free exchange of scientific information with the rest of the world.

According to a Tribune story, he said of the bomb project: "We were troubled about what we were up to," although he didn't elaborate further.

He also refused to answer questions after the talk, except to add: "I love my country, if that's what you want to know."

A legacy of fear

Oppenheimer died at the age of 62 of throat cancer in New Jersey on Feb. 19, 1967, after a lifetime of chain- smoking cigarettes and pipes.

If he were still around today, Robinson said Oppenheimer would like much of what he would find in New Mexico — especially some of the environmental measures in the state.

"I think he would be very pleased with this action that's happened to make the Valle Grande a national park," Robinson said of the huge tract of land that skirts the Los Alamos area.

"I think he'd be pleased that you can still get out in the wilderness and enjoy it here," he said. "That was one of the things that was true when he first came to New Mexico, and it's still true today."

Sterling Colgate wonders if the weapons Oppenheimer helped create also helped construct a balance point between nations as they contemplate going to war.

"The sum of all fears, the greatest fear for humanity, is that a 100-megaton bomb, or a number of them, be blown off in our cities and destroy our culture," Colgate said. "Nobody wants that to happen."

And that idea is a major part of Oppenheimer's legacy in New Mexico, Hopkins said.

"The fact that nuclear weapons and a nuclear war would be so horrible has, I think, prevented another World War II situation from happening again," Hopkins said.

"Nuclear weapons mean you're holding the leaders of the country responsible for their decisions — and not placing that responsibility, as much, in the hands of the 18- and 19-year-olds to do the fighting."