



1 / 14 Chevron Chevron Photograph Courtesy Blast Books

Bob Horton, a field support engineer in the Pulverizing Machinery Division of Slick Industrial; Larry L. Carpenter, Sr., of Nuclear Shielding Services; Walter Mork of Hale Sanitary Supply, “New Mexico’s Oldest and Largest.” Theirs are three business cards among the thousands that were collected by an unknown employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, between 1967 and 1978. Now, decades later, they have been arranged into a book called “Los Alamos Rolodex,” by the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

Prior to their rediscovery by the C.L.U.I., the cards spent many years in the Black Hole, a museum-junkyard housed in a former Shop ’N’ Cart and evangelical Lutheran church. The Black Hole was run by Ed Grothus, who had worked for twenty years as a machinist in the L.A.N.L. Weapons Group, measuring the ultra-precise conventional explosives that are required to detonate a fission device. He quit in 1969, disillusioned by the war in Vietnam, and spent the rest of his life campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He founded the First Church of High Technology, where he held Critical Mass, and opened the Black Hole. For forty years he bought cast-off equipment and office supplies from the lab—oscilloscopes, laser assembles, a vintage radio purportedly owned by J. Robert Oppenheimer, several of the adding machines that Enrico Fermi and his colleagues might have used in building the first bomb.

Grothus died in 2009, and, although the Black Hole is still open, it is in its final throes, according to Matt Coolidge, the director of the C.L.U.I. “People recognized the good stuff early on,” he told me. The Rolodexes—seven in all—were sitting at the bottom of a cardboard box, surrounded by broken typewriters and other detritus. They were an arbitrary and incomplete fragment of the lab’s history, just one set of contacts among thousands. The letters “A” and “C” were missing. Nonetheless, Coolidge realized, the cards were an important reminder that the bomb was built, as he put it, by “people talking to people.” Without Horton’s pulverizers or Mork’s sanitary supplies, there would have been no warheads with which to guarantee mutually assured destruction.

From an aesthetic point of view, the cards are a visual feast of retro typography. Many of the company names evoke a postwar enthusiasm for all things nuclear, from Bio-Rad Laboratories to Interactive Radiation, and the logos tend to be variations on whirling atoms or stratosphere-bound rockets—or, in some exuberant cases, both. The cards’ original owner noted the date of acquisition on the back of each one, and if they are arranged chronologically, Coolidge said, it becomes possible “to see the sixties becoming the seventies, just through the graphic design and the occasional head shot with a bushy mustache.” With only one or two exceptions, the cards conjure up an image of a corn-fed, male America, full of Hanks, Bills, Buds, and Dons. “We did find one woman’s business card,” Coolidge said. It belonged to Mrs. Corinne Bond, of David’s Work Gloves, the “Goliath of the Work Glove Field.”

The cards and their owners hailed from all over the country—Southern California to eastern Massachusetts, Texas to New Jersey. During the Second World War, Coolidge said, the lab itself represented a “vast national machine that gathered material from the entire landscape, from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Hanford, Washington, and processed it into a couple of grapefruits of material with the power to destroy the world.” After the war, the defense-industrial machine’s hold only strengthened. From the perspective of the C.L.U.I., which seeks to spread “knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived,” much of the contemporary American landscape was shaped by it. The business cards tell the story not only of Los Alamos but also of atomic America—its casual sexism, its techno-optimism, its vast reach across the economy that it both fuelled and existed to defend.

Coolidge and his colleague Aurora Tang, the program manager who first fished the Rolodexes out from their box, have tried calling some of the numbers on the cards. All of them were out of service. Nonetheless, Coolidge said, he still imagines that “we could find some of these people, as old men, living their lives.” In the meantime, these fragments give us a way to begin to wonder about all the nuclear stories that we don’t know and will never hear.