Edith C. Truslow, 91; Co-Wrote History of Atomic Bomb Test

Edith Clinton Truslow, 91, who co-wrote a history of the experiment that produced the atomic bomb, died Saturday in Santa Fe, N.M. The cause of death was not disclosed.

She was co-author with David Hawkins and Ralph C. Smith of “Project Y: The Los Alamos Story,” which was published in 1983, 36 years after it was written and classified secret by the federal government.

It was declassified in the early 1960s, but was virtually unavailable until its reissue two decades later. A Los Angeles Times review called it “considerably more literate and revealing than most of the genre.”

Truslow had been a lieutenant in the Women’s Army Corps after World War II when she won a transfer to Los Alamos, N.M., as a historian in 1946, the year after the test blast overseen by Robert J. Oppenheimer, director of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos Laboratory. She later retired from the military and spent 35 years working as a commercial photographer.

The history was primarily the work of Truslow’s colleague, Hawkins, a UC Berkeley philosopher who joined his friend Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in 1943 as the project’s troubleshooter and later as its official historian.