From Shiv Visvanathan's A Carnival of Science:
"At first sight, the appearance of these towns is deceptive. Their antiseptic affluence hides their totalitarian intent; their suburban comfort, the banalization of evil in modern society. 'Walking through its main street, with artificially watered lawns...in front of standardized houses pained in bright Easter egg colours,' Jungk notices children playing a new variant of hopscotch with squares marked radioactive and uncontaminated. Los Alamos is advertised as a virtuous, high IQ town with no one either idle or unemployed. Jungk remarks:
It would not need all these superlatives to show me that Los Alamos is a quite exceptional place. Actually this walled settlement on a plateau three thousand feet high should not be called a town at all. For any town must have some proportion of freedom in order to be able to develop and live, even to be able to die. But the collection of houses and workshops on the hill above the Rio Grande is an artificial and arbitrary product. It will never be acquired and the whole population is looked upon as transient. If a man gives up his job, if he is discharged or pensioned, he must give up his house which belongs to the government and leaves Los Alamos.
For this reason, one never sees old people here, except a few indispensable scientific pundits. The children will have to leave once they reach working age. They can only remain only if they find a job here after passing security department's personality and aptitude tests. 'There is no staying on in the town where they are born and reared.'
Los Alamos represents the final resolution of liberal science. For liberalism, the private was sacred and the public was open and accessible. In a bizzare inversion, vivisectionist science has opened up the privacy of the body and soul to the public scrutiny of the clinical gaze, while science as public knowledge has become increasingly secret and forced into the most monstrous of total institutions - the research cities of the twentieth century. One is left with a deep suspicion that the transition from the university to the company town was effected not on grounds of efficiency but for reasons of state. The company town facilitated external control of scientific research."
