Bride of Los Alamos

It was an evening in July, late for a school night, and the line for the women’s room in the Brooklyn movie theater was as long as one might expect after a three-hour movie. Like millions of others, we had just seen Oppenheimer. A young woman ahead of me was venting to the group. “I can’t believe I had to spend three hours watching a story about a bunch of men,” she fumed. “What about the women?” I kept my mouth shut, but in my head I answered her question.

I had just been appointed as deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the NYPD, and as the first woman in that job, I’d been sharing a fair amount about my family history, including my grandfather’s role in the Manhattan Project. But I hadn’t talked much about the woman in that story.

Francoise Ulam—or Mémé, as I, her only grandchild, would know her—met the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in the summer of 1940 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A recent émigré from France, she was working while attending graduate school at Mount Holyoke. He, like her, was Jewish, and had fled with his younger brother Adam from Poland on the eve of the German invasion to teach math at Harvard. “Castaways from the ruins of the Old World,” Mémé wrote in her memoirs, “we were brought together on the shores of the New.”

Marooned in the U.S. as fighting spread across Europe, and receiving increasingly desperate dispatches from friends and family in Poland and France (they would both lose much of their families to the death camps and the war), my grandfather yearned to contribute to the fight against Germany. After he got his citizenship in 1943, opportunity arrived in the form of an invitation brokered by his best friend, the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann. All he was told of the mysterious “Project Y” was that it would be in the American Southwest, near the town of Santa Fe. Mémé was newly pregnant with my mother when she and my grandfather set off across the country by train to join the Manhattan Project. When they arrived at the high-mountain depot of Lamy, New Mexico, my grandfather remarked that the air felt like champagne.

Up on the Hill, as Los Alamos was known, my grandparents found a rarefied atmosphere of brilliant and iconoclastic scientists from across Europe and the U.S. Mémé described it as a “Magic Mountain.” It was also a world defined by secrets. Its very existence, of course, was classified (children like my mother who were born there during the war had a P.O. Box address on their birth certificates), and wives weren’t supposed to know what their husbands were doing. In reality, however, word spread.

Mémé recalls the famous Soviet spy Klaus Fuchs frequently hiking with my grandparents and their friends, and playing with my mother when she was a baby. And she herself knew that the aim of the project was to develop an entirely new weapon that would end the war. When I was in college, I interviewed some of the Los Alamos wives for my thesis—naively, I was surprised to learn that like Mémé many had known quite a bit about what was happening inside the lab.

The women kept their own secrets, too. As I grew up, Mémé told me many stories about the domestic world that accompanied the scientific one, with all the intimacies that naturally accompanied the remoteness of the location and the intensity of the times. It was the women, not the men, who knew about the wealthy doctor in the nearby town of Espanola who provided abortions on Saturdays, when his office was officially closed.

Los Alamos’ blend of domestic and international, personal and professional, has always intrigued me. As someone whose job it is to keep secrets, I often wonder whether such an experiment would be possible today, scientifically or socially. Because their fenced-in City on a Hill was cut off from the rest of the world by geography and the watchful eye of the U.S. government, Los Alamos became a world unto itself. It retained some of the summer camp spirit of the boys’ boarding school that J. Robert Oppenheimer had attended years before, and on whose campus the lab was built. Leavening long days spent working on the creation of the “Gadget,” researchers discussed theoretical math and applied physics on hikes in the Jemez mountains, and at parties in the town’s social center of gravity, the Fuller Lodge.

The day after my mother turned 1, Mémé remembers waking before dawn to watch for evidence of the atom bomb’s test explosion, in the aptly named Jornado del Muerto desert some four hours’ drive south. As the scientists who had been to Trinity returned later that day—pale, in awe, and struggling to describe what they witnessed—she remembers a palpable shift in mood engulfing the town. It lasted for the next three weeks, until, over Hiroshima, the veil of secrecy was lifted and the entire world learned what had been created on the Hill.

Mémé became disillusioned by the atomic project in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the town shifted from military to civilian control after the war’s end, the remaining scientists turned toward the next horizon—a thermonuclear weapon. Mémé was ardently opposed to its development. Many of the scientists working on it continued to hope that it would succeed in rendering war obsolete, but she was dubious. Hardly a religious person, she secretly prayed they would abandon the hydrogen bomb project.

For my grandfather, though, the scientific endeavor was an end unto itself, and he became centrally involved in the development of the Super, as the H-bomb was known. In his estimation, “Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences … What would Archimedes and Newton have done if they had worried about the consequences of their thoughts?” For her, things were not that easy—“in my mind I knew he made sense,” she wrote. “In my heart I could not follow.”

It must have been all the more fraught, then, that it was he who solved the problem of how to detonate the Super. Mémé vividly recounts the moment she came across my grandfather sitting in the kitchen one day, staring blindly into their garden. “I found a way to make it work,” he said. “It’s a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.” When the U.S. tested Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb built using the new design, it vaporized an entire South Pacific island. 

My grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack when he was 75 and I was 7. Mémé numbly channeled her grief into editing and publishing his voluminous collection of papers and chronicling their lives. Though she wasn’t a mathematician, she had over the years developed a working understanding of his contributions: the Ulam-Teller method for generating a thermonuclear fusion reaction through implosion, the Monte Carlo method, and Orion, a short-lived project to power rockets through space using nuclear pulse propulsion. She took up his ideas to retain her connection to him, an impulse that I have only recently begun to truly understand.

She also took it upon herself to impart our family history to me, from as early as I can remember. Going through old papers after my mother died three years ago, I came upon a second-grade report that I wrote with a picture of a mushroom cloud and a label that said “H-bomb.” I don’t remember making it, and I can only imagine the reaction of my teacher at the time.

“No more Mémé talk!” I would often protest as a little girl when Mémé spoke to my mother in French. They ignored me, and my only recourse was to learn. Mémé took my lecons de francais very seriously, meticulously drawing images for my vocabulary studies and grading my weekly dictées with great exigence.

Many of my most vivid childhood memories take place in the house my grandparents had retired to on Old Santa Fe Trail, which was a short walk from my house. The front yard had commanding views of the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains, and Mémé would make her famous lemon cake and compote d’abricots from the local trees while telling me stories. Her French remove, her quiet perspicacity and unruffled cool, the way she embodied culture and worldliness, were equal parts calming and alluring as I grew older. As a teenager, I would help her with her writing projects, learning our family history, and her secrets. Her wisdom was understated, provided without fanfare or judgment, and it knew no bounds.

While Mémé rarely interfered with my personal or professional decisions, looking back I see her influence at every turn. “Comment ca va chez le NYPD?” she would ask me whenever I returned to Santa Fe from New York to visit in the years before she died. She was both amused by and proud of my chosen profession, and she closely followed the issues I worked on. Iconoclastic and always ahead of her time, she was the first person I knew to own a computer—and yet she was deeply and presciently apprehensive about the risks of the digital world. In her way, she too was a national security practitioner.

“No more Mémé talk,” my mother said when I picked up the phone. It was April 30, 2011, and Mémé had just died at the age of 93. In her later years she had talked about death with the dispassionate anticipation of her adopted Buddhism, but the end hadn’t come easily. I went to visit her soon before she died, and she was in a fugue state, recollections from part of her brain that had not been accessed in decades tumbling out of her in French. She was transported back to her deep childhood, crying out unsettlingly for “Maman!” The last time she had seen her mother, Madeleine, was in August 1938, when at 20 my grandmother set sail for the United States.

When we went through Mémé’s papers after she died, I came upon a letter from the French government, dated to the 1970s, confirming that Madeleine had been sent to the death camps from Drancy. Enclosed by way of evidence was a scalloped-edged, black-and-white photo of Allied soldiers standing around the rim of a large pit full of dozens of corpses. According to the relevant records, Madeleine was among them. In all my years of helping her memorialize her past, Mémé had never brought up the letter or the photo.

She had spent so much time telling my grandfather’s story and had left so much of her own untold. Now it’s for me to rectify that.