> at one point, when Santa Fe residents began speculating about what the masses of scientists and military personnel on the Hill could be up to, Oppenheimer enlisted the Serbers to trek down to Santa Fe and personally spread false information.
Being at a DoD lab, I'm trying imagine a situation where I'd be told to do that, and how I'd respond.
I'd just like to live in a United States that was still trying to actually be the best in the world instead of lowering expectations to the point where no obvious incompetence is considered a massive achievement...
WWII had a huge war-footing ramp up (IBM's factories converted to making machine guns etc; rationing; war dominating the headlines, huge war bond and material drives; et al) and enough men under arms that the labor markets were seriously distorted (women recruited for previously male-only occupations; wage and price controls lead to company-sponsored health insurance etc etc). The war effort was ever-present.
Viet nam was more distant; it didn't completely dominate the headlines and the mass draft of middle class kids was seen by many (though far from the majority BTW!) as unfair. But the expansion of the Great Society was at least as big a deal if not bigger, and both efforts were funded by an expansion of the national debt through traditional (not "war bonds") means.
In contrast: today's permanent-war has long slipped from the headlines (just checked home pages NYT, Wapo and Fox and at this instant none have an article about the Middle East or Afghanistan or any military action at all on the front page, except for NYT's video about the Saudi royal family). While yes, the military budget has ballooned, its primary use seems to be a way to provide a government jobs program and cash payments to large donors in the military industrial complex (a term coined in a warning by a GOP president and war hero BTW).
As an aside: the general US view of the US military from the 1790s to the 1980s was one of regrettable ridicule (incompetent and inefficient, but necessary and better than nothing). This includes the Union army of the civil war (they had to riot to get pensions and health care), the WWI expeditionary force, WWI and Viet nam. Think SNAFU, FUBAR, Bill Mauldin, Catch-22...none of the could appear in Stars and Stripes today. Instead we get the hagiography of Tom Clancy. In fact as the military is more and more distant from the bulk of the populace, its halo has increased.
However it is, as I say distant. The country is not at all on a war footing. Of course it faces no existential external threat. I am glad that it is not girded for war, but the current state WRT to militarization and discussion of war is also very unhealthy.
I liked the part where they discarded them all after using them to build the most deadly weapon ever.
Accusations of communism and disloyalty continued to dog the couple, especially with the dawn of the Cold War. Oppenheimer himself battled similar rumors, largely because his wife had at one point joined the Communist Party; in 1954, despite swearing loyalty to the U.S., his security clearance was revoked.
Charlotte Serber likewise struggled to obtain another high-profile librarian job. Her application to work in the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory was rejected because she couldn’t get clearance, probably because of her political background.
Let that be a lesson for all the IT guys who work for the NSA/CIA/DoD.
I've read about this before and it just saddens me to no end. These folks completely dedicated themselves to their work and the success of the project, and uprooted their lives and lived in secrecy for years. In my opinion, they were as much heroes as those returning home from battle overseas.
The Soviet Union duplicated the A-bomb in record time due to spies on the project. That helped threaten the entire free world and kept hundreds of millions enslaved.
Managers of the Manhattan project had every reason to be concerned about workers who were or might be communist sympathizers. They just didn't find the right ones.
My favorite story about the Manhattan Project librarian is the gold sphere. One research experiment required a 6 inch gold sphere and another a 10 inch platinum disk. Since the library vault was the more secure place, these packages were sent to the library. Charlotte (the librarian) amused herself by asking people if they could move the little packages for her. The would-be assistant was surprised that he couldn't move the packages: the gold sphere weighed 80 pounds and the platinum disk 60.
There's a section in "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" about the Los Alamos library. Feynman was into safecracking as a hobby, but didn't get anywhere on the library's vault.
Presumably that's the same one that's described in the article as "an “ancient” safe that functioned so poorly, it opened only if Serber kicked it at a particular point while typing in the lock combination."
> at one point, when Santa Fe residents began speculating about what the masses of scientists and military personnel on the Hill could be up to, Oppenheimer enlisted the Serbers to trek down to Santa Fe and personally spread false information.
Being at a DoD lab, I'm trying imagine a situation where I'd be told to do that, and how I'd respond.