Brookhaven National Laboratory was founded in 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War. Its location in Upton, NY, had previously been an army base, Camp Upton. Soldiers were trained there during both the First and the Second World Wars. After World War Two, the US military no longer needed the base, and it was decided to repurpose the camp as a research facility. The new laboratory was financed by the Atomic Energy Commission (the forerunner of the Department of Energy) but operated by a group of nine eastern universities.
Brookhaven’s original scientific mission arose from the politics of atomic power in the years directly after the war. The United States wanted to emphasize the peaceful applications of nuclear research, which most people associated primarily with weapons. This was understandable, given that the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still fresh and the threat of a potential nuclear conflict with the USSR loomed in the background. But there were many non-defense-related applications of nuclear energy, including basic research in chemistry, physics, biology and medicine. In an age of “Big Science,” Brookhaven also offered the universities that ran it access to equipment that they could not afford individually.
Because of the association between atomic energy and the atomic bomb, it was difficult for a lot of people to wrap their heads around the idea of a peaceful nuclear facility. According to Brookhaven employees interviewed by Newsday twenty years later about the history of the lab, a local newspaper had run a story in the late 1940s with the headline “Brookhaven’s Nuclear Reactor Will Shoot Radioactive Material to Control the Weather.” Even twenty years later, Newsday reported, in the late 1960s, “on visitors’ day each year, someone says, ‘All right. Quit your kidding. Where do you really make the bomb?’” Brookhaven staff made “a constant effort…to keep the neighboring communities informed about the general aspects of the research work done.” In addition to hosting Visitors’ Day each year, speakers from Brookhaven addressed a wide variety of local clubs and associations.
Photo Credit: University of Virginia, Small Special Collections Library, W. Ralph Singleton Collection.