Douglas' Travels in the Americas: Los Alamos & The Bradbury Science Museum.

I arrived at tonight's motel too early to check in, so I gauged its rough location in town and set the Sat Nav for Los Alamos and the Bradbury Science Museum which is run by the Los Alamos Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy - NOT Department of Defence, which the curator was very keen to iterate.

I have a sort of morbid fascination with Nuclear Weapons as spending my formative years in the tail end of the cold war it's one of the things that really did trouble me when I was young.

Los Alamos is where the weapons dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were physically developed before being tested. It's another town built very quickly where previously there was nothing and where human minds performed amazing feats of ingenuity while assisted by unlimited amounts of money. If you're interested, look out for articles and clips on Youtube about the Manhattan Project.

Anyway, the drive down there was pretty.

More Mexican themed road furniture.

Mountains with snow on.

Real cowboy country. I kept expecting Will Rogers or Clint Eastwood to drive 10,000 steers over the hill.

This road is fairly twisty.

It is also quite steep so I stopped and gave Camry a little rest.

The Scenery here is breathtaking. It's the

My head looks very small. Is it because I am getting older?

This is approximately what the 90 tons of weapons grade Plutonium the US admits it has made would look like if you poured it into an ice cream cone. It looks like a lot less than 90 Tons to me, but it's a lot heavier than metals we are used to like Steel and Aloominum.

Teaching honey bees to sniff out explosives using pavlovian responses. Work pioneered at Los Alamos.

I hope they manage to find a way to apply that one, it's amazing what human beings can think of and do. Perhaps it's at this same lab that they trained a dolphins to hide an exploding cigar in a giant clam off the coast of Cuba so that when Fidel Castro went swimming, the CIA could blow him up.

I got chatting to the curator. His wife goes on holiday to Orkney for a week every year. She loves it.

Models of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons.

Bill Nye the Science Guy was a bit of a plonker.

I drove back to Santa Fe on a road next to LANSCE. The building is over a mile long.

I suppose radiation lets you look inside stuff, so it's a good thing. The museum almost made me glad that humankind split the atom. I got the feeling that's exactly what it was designed to do.