Nuke Exhibit Depicts 'Festive Menace'

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1, 2003 — -- — Step into the top-secret U.S. government laboratory where American scientists created the atomic bomb in 1945.

Sculptor Jim Sanborn spent five years collecting chunks of uranium, radiation detectors, spherical devices, and government photographs to help him depict the Critical Assembly Lab and the Chemicals and Metals Lab at Los Alamos, N.M., as they looked in the final months of the Manhattan Project.

His exhibit opens today at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, and it's called, "Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction."

Seduction?

"Very often scientists can be seduced by the power they are working with," Sanborn said. The exhibit "is about the seductive effect these materials have on scientists. Nuclear power is very seductive."

Sanborn depicts the experiments by which U.S. scientists learned to press the trigger that launched the nuclear arms race that continues today.

Because it is so technically detailed, the exhibit may ignite a debate about whether it reveals too much about how to make the bomb (after all, Iran and North Korea are working on similar devices, far less primitive and far more potent).

"The information contained here is readily available from public sources, including hundreds of declassified documents posted on the Internet," Sanborn said, but "I don't think it's been represented three dimensionally so precisely before."

Corcoran curator Jonathan Binstock calls Sanborn's installation "a unique brew of historical accuracy and aesthetic license."

"This is a shrine to the best and the brightest," said Mills Davis, a computer consultant who viewed a preview and said the exhibit extols the genius of the bomb's scientists. "It's only smaller minds who would say: 'By God, if we start talking about this, people will start making bombs!'"

Sanborn said he had no idea whether the federal government might attempt to limit access to the exhibit materials.

If President Bush chose to view the exhibit, "I think he would probably be quite chilled by just how much information is available to everyone about this subject," Sanborn said. "You're all of a sudden surrounded by the lab. I'm not sure it's a position he's ever been in."