Children of Usher: Growing Up in Los Alamos

Most treatments of the cold war attempt to assess the political and scientific impacts of the nuclear age and the horrors of weapons of mass destruction. While there are dramatic stories in the history and science of nuclear power, one often overlooked aspect is that entire communities were created to support the development of nuclear power. These communities not only included scientists and engineers, but husbands, wives and children. The children grew up as children everywhere do, trying to be just like their parents. The games these children played reflected their upbringing and resulted in sometimes sad and sometimes outrageously funny consequences. This is a collection of true stories of children coming to age under the routine threat of global annihilation and how they routinely coped with thinking about the unthinkable.