Z Division: The Nuclear City Is Born
Near Albuquerque, New Mexico
In July of nineteen forty-five, weeks before the Trinity test changed the world, the Manhattan Project established a new division at Kirtland Field near Albuquerque. They called it Z Division. Its job was to handle future weapons development, testing, and assembly for the Manhattan Engineer District. The leaders of the atomic program had looked at Kirtland Field, an Army training facility east of the Sandia Mountains, and decided that this semi-arid plateau, far from the coasts and screened by mountains, was the right place to build a nuclear weapons complex.
The timing matters. Z Division was established before Trinity. Before Hiroshima. Before the world knew that nuclear weapons existed. Albuquerque had already been chosen.
In the years that followed, the complex grew. The Army built Manzano Base into the Manzano Mountains south of Kirtland Field, boring tunnels into granite to create underground storage vaults for nuclear weapons. Historians have identified Manzano Base as the first of six original National Stockpile Sites for nuclear warheads in the United States. Between nineteen forty-eight and nineteen fifty-two, a facility called Tech Area Two was the primary assembly site for America's nuclear weapons, putting together the non-nuclear components before the devices were mated with their cores elsewhere.
Sandia National Laboratories, which grew out of Z Division, became one of the two principal nuclear weapons design laboratories in the United States, alongside Los Alamos. On July first, nineteen seventy-one, Manzano Base, Sandia Base, and Kirtland Field were consolidated into a single installation, Kirtland Air Force Base, which today hosts Sandia National Laboratories, the Air Force's Nuclear Weapons Center, and what defense analysts estimate to be the nation's largest single repository of nuclear warheads, possibly the world's largest, with estimates ranging up to two thousand five hundred warheads stored in the tunnels and bunkers of the Manzano Mountains.
The city of Albuquerque has lived alongside this stockpile since the late nineteen forties. It is not prominently marked on tourist maps.
