Sandia National Laboratories is behind so many of the country's critical national defense programs, it's a wonder that most people haven't heard of it.

After the end of the Second World War, J. Robert Oppenheimer (the man considered to be the father of the atomic bomb and a professor at the University of California) needed to find a way to maintain the momentum of the short-term atom bomb research project.

Oppenheimer ran the Manhattan Project, the effort to collect the most brilliant minds in the United States to develop an atomic bomb. The physics super-team built the two nuclear weapons dropped on Japan from scratch. They operated out of a laboratory at Los Alamos.

Once the war was over, Oppenheimer wanted to keep the effort going. In order to retain personnel, the army renovated Oxnard Field, a former airport near Albuquerque, into the nation's primary nuclear research facility.