Last updated: March 8, 2022
Place
TA-18 Overlook
LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Quick Facts
OPEN TO PUBLIC:
No
MANAGED BY:
This site is on Los Alamos National Laboratory property. You can only access it through guided tours offered on specific dates. Find out more about tour reservations and schedules on the Bradbury Museum website.
This area, like much of the United States, has long been the home of indigenous peoples. Walking the trail to the TA-18 Overlook takes the same path the Ancestral Pueblo people used generations before the Manhattan Project occupied this land.
Early laboratory development centered around Ashley Pond in modern day downtown Los Alamos. As the project and experimental needs grew, so did the laboratory’s development. In the fall of 1943, and throughout 1944, the lab expanded outside of the main technical area. TA-18 was a product of this expansion. By June of 1945, 40 percent of the laboratory’s buildings were in outlying sites.
Continue Your Journey
On the US Department of Energy tour to Technical Area 18, you go inside the Slotin Building, which bears the name of physicist Louis Slotin who was fatally exposed to radiation in that building. Additionally, you may peer into the Pond Cabin windows, where Emilio Segre conducted his plutonium research. You walk near Battleship Bunker - Creutz Test and Battleship Bunker - Magnetic Method sites where scientists conducted early implosion tests prior to the Trinity Test.
Can’t get on a Department of Energy tour? Learn more about the history of the Manhattan Project by visiting the Bradbury Science Museum! The museum’s interactive exhibits share stories from the project and provide a glimpse of other “behind the fence” historical sites.