Family Displaced by 1942 Atomic Bomb Project : Sons Help Build Weapons Poet Opposed

. . . The weapons he has invented must destroy him.

Out of each violated atom he himself shall let loose

the fire of his own annihilation.

--”Endangered Species,”

a poem by Peggy Pond Church

Ted Church knew something was up that December. He was 17 and the year was 1942, the year when war came to the secluded mesa his family called home.

Trenches were dug. The Army rolled in. Ted and his younger brothers needed passes to come and go.

It was war. But never a shot was fired. This was the Manhattan Project, the program that created the world’s first atomic bomb.

Ted’s parents, Peggy Pond Church and Ferm Church, ran the Los Alamos Ranch School, an elite private academy for boys. It was their life and their livelihood and, that December, it was taken away by one man’s vision.

School Condemned

The ranch school was condemned and the family evicted by the government, which paid only $7.69 an acre. A mesa created in a volcanic eruption became almost overnight the secret home of the Manhattan Project.

Peggy Pond Church, author and poet, wrote about peace and the death-maker created on her homestead until she died 20 months ago. Her three sons--Ted, now 63, Allen, 59, Hugh, 56--are still bitter.

But, in a quirk of history and destiny, all three sons grew up to work for the bomb makers, on federal nuclear weapons programs here at Sandia National Laboratories, less than 100 miles from the mesa.

They carry on the work of J. Robert Oppenheimer even as they carry the anger of losing their land to Oppenheimer, who knew the serene beauty of the ranch school from summer trips.

Feeling of Distress

“Life is one big conflict,” Hugh Church said. “There are certain feelings of distress at times with what would happen if all these devices here were ever used. But striving to keep them from being used is a major effort here, too.”

Today, the 54,000 acres of family land remain the home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the top-secret center responsible for nearly every nuclear warhead of the 1980s.

Sandia is a cousin laboratory of sorts, where work proceeds on arming and fusing the weapons, as well as on their safety and reliability.

Over long careers, all three brothers have returned to New Mexico and worked on nuclear projects. Government is the major employer along Interstate 25, America’s Nuclear Highway, and warheads are its primary task.

“I had a good offer, so I came here, and I’ve been here ever since,” said Allen Church, who works in Sandia’s arming and firing division.

Worked in Movies

But, like the others, Allen never set out to work here. He studied to be a veterinarian but struggled with organic chemistry. He went to Hollywood and worked on six movies but decided acting was too unstable. He was drafted for the Korean War and later studied electrical engineering at Stanford University. Then he came back to the Southwest, to New Mexico, to Sandia.

“This is part of my spirit, this part of the country,” he said.

Ted wanted to go into stage lighting but first served in the Navy. He worked in electronics and communications, then went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had offers from electrical engineering firms, but he, too, wanted to get closer to home. So it was Sandia, where he studies health and safety issues.

Hugh studied physics and meteorology, receiving a master’s degree from UCLA. He worked for the U.S. Weather Bureau, then returned to New Mexico in 1957, working on atmospheric weapons effects such as blast, fallout and, more recently, “nuclear winter,” a possible consequence of nuclear war in which smoke from weapons blasts and fires would encircle the Earth and block much of the sun’s light and heat.

Over the years, the brothers have wrestled with the ethics of nuclear weapons. They passionately disagreed with their mother, but they always made peace.

“She was always upset that the three of us ended up together here,” Ted said. “But she was quite tolerant of it. She made her feelings known.”

Became a Quaker

Ten years ago, Ted became a Quaker, joining a faith with a basic tenet that war is wrong. He believes the faith fits with the work he does.

“As long as nuclear weapons exist, they demand a response from me,” he said. “Many engineers and scientists just say: ‘It’s up to the politicians.’ But I feel engineers and scientists have a responsibility to help the public understand.”

All three talk of the responsibility borne by those who work with man’s most deadly creations.

“People on the outside have terrific imaginations,” Allen said. “People say: ‘What about all those crazy people who work with nuclear weapons?’ I say we’re not crazy. I find people here to be very sincere; they take it with a great deal of responsibility. I’d rather be a part of it than leave it to someone else.”

The brothers say they were too young to fully understand what was happening when the family received the eviction letter on Dec. 7, 1942--exactly one year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

‘It Was All Frightening’

“We really knew nothing about what was going on, but we knew it had something to do with the war effort, and it was all frightening,” Ted said. “My parents knew Oppenheimer, and I suspect my father knew exactly what was happening.”

The family members had been told that they could move back when the war ended. They left behind personal belongings in the rush to vacate and never recovered some Indian blankets, pottery and other treasures.

It still hurts.

“We’re displaced persons. We were not asked. We were told,” Ted said.

“We were promised return of the land when the war was over, and, of course, it wasn’t,” Hugh said.

Ferm Church tried to restart the ranch school at another site but failed. He wound up building power lines all over New Mexico but never taught again. He died in 1975.

Peggy Pond Church once said: “We played the game and hid the soreness in our hearts as best we could. . . . I try not to sit in judgment on the world. But I don’t go back to Los Alamos now because it’s so ugly I can’t stand it.”