Off the map: the secret cities behind the atom bomb | Cities | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/may/03/off-the-map-the-secret-cities-behind-the-atom-bomb-manhattan-project
In 1943, three ordinary-looking US cities were constructed at record speed – but left off all maps. They had an extraordinary purpose: to create nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan project
#Oak_Ridge
#Hanson déjà bien présente ici de par les différents incidents liés à son statut de poubelle nucléaire
et #Los_Alamos, finalement peu vue par ici et notamment,
Atomic City, USA : how once-secret Los Alamos became a millionaire’s enclave | Cities | The Guardian (1/11/2016)
▻https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/nov/01/atomic-city-los-alamos-secret-town-nuclear-millionaires
Atomic City, USA: how once-secret Los Alamos became a millionaire’s enclave
Home to the scientists who built the nuclear bomb, the company town of Los Alamos, New Mexico is today one of the richest in the country – even as toxic waste threatens its residents and neighbouring Española struggles with poverty
avec notamment une expérience (totalement ratée…) de #ruissellement
‘It’s a stark example of the 1% and 99%’
Today Los Alamos has become one of the richest cities in America. At least one in every nine people – a whopping 12% of the population – is thought to be a millionaire. Los Alamos also regularly tops the list in terms of the best education and lowest crime levels in the state. It has one of the country’s highest concentration of PhDs.
On the map of New Mexico, Los Alamos county – created in 1949 – is a tiny dot next to Rio Arriba, one of the largest counties in the state. In Los Alamos, average incomes are twice as high as those in Rio Arriba. A 2012 Census Bureau report said this was one of the largest wealth gaps between two neighbouring counties in America.
Just 30km from this affluent island is the town of Española. Here the median household income is $33,000 and almost 30% of the population live under the poverty line. For years it has also struggled with its reputation as the heroin overdose capital of America.
Hunner describes the disparity between Los Alamos and neighbouring towns as almost inevitable. “We’re really a poor state,” he says. “So you plop this federally supported research and development lab, where you have to pay people a lot of money to stay there, and of course there’s going to be a disparity between the people who live there and the people in Española.”
But, he adds, a lot of people who live in Española work in Los Alamos. “In that whole northern New Mexico area, there is a big commute.”
Others see the inequality between Los Alamos and neighbouring communities as a prime example of a common dynamic across the country – and a reminder of how stories of wealth “ #trickling_down ” can be far-fetched.