Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/NAS Livermore (site)

 Second World War 1939-1945, lab, nuclear research centre

7000 East Avenue
Livermore, CA 94550

Naval Air Station, Livermore was built in 1942 four miles east of Livermore to relieve overcrowding of the naval air facilities at Oakland Municipal Airport. The primary mission of the base was to train pilots. Up to October 1944 some 4000 cadets trained here in N2S trainers known as "Yellow Perils". By late 1944 the Navy needed fewer pilots, so training operations ended and the station was given several new tasks; servicing fleet air units preparing for overseas operation, storing aircraft, repairing aircraft and the training of Navy and Marine air reservists.After the war the station closed down in stages and was decommissioned altogether in 1946. NAS, Livermore had the following outlying fields during the war:

- Abel Field, 1 mile northeast of Milpitas Brown Airport, 7 miles northwest of Tracy
- Brown-Fabian Airport, 3.5 miles west of Tracy
- Cope Field, 2 miles northeast of Pleasanton
- Gelderman Airport, 4 miles north of Dublin
- Heath Airport, 3 miles south of Irvington
- Linderman Airport, 9 miles northwest of Tracy
- Livermore Airport, 2 miles northwest of Livermore
- May's School Field, 4.5 miles northeast of Livermore
- Rita Butterworth Airport, 3 miles northeast of Pleasanton
- Spring Valley Airport, 2.5 miles northwest of Pleasanton
- Wagoner Airport, 1.5 miles southwest of Livermore

LLNL was established in 1952 as the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore as an offshoot of the existing University of California Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley. It was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the nuclear weapon design laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons. Edward Teller and Ernest O. Lawrence, director of the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, are regarded as the co-founders of the Livermore Laboratory.

The laboratory became known as the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1971.

www.llnl.gov/
www.militarymuseum.org/NASLivermore.html