Three new national parks are being proposed and might just inch their way through Congress in the near future. The three projected parks would be sites of former nuclear testing: Hanford, Washington, Oak Ridge Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico, according to the Washington Post.
The Hanford site produced plutonium. The Oak Ridge site enriched uranium. And workers in Los Alamos used those materials to assemble the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs dropped on Japan, forcing the Japanese surrender and ending the war. About 200,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki perished.
The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation called the creation and use of the atomic bomb “the single most significant event of the 20th century’’ in advocating the preservation of buildings once scheduled for demolition.
