
The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project’s Secrets - Hooke
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/manhattan-project-library-charlotte-serber-oppenheimer-fbi
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sndean
I don't know why I found this so surprising:

> 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.

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funnyfacts365
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in 1954, despite swearing loyalty to the U.S., his security clearance was
revoked.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.

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bitJericho
Let that be a lesson for anyone that wants to work for or with the us
government.

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kens
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.

(From the Los Alamos Primer, page 30)

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Animats
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.

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H4CK3RM4N
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."

That's also sourced back to a book about the Manhattan Project:
[https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ys0N4rFgt6UC&pg=PA160&l...](https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ys0N4rFgt6UC&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=%22charlotte+serber%22&source=bl&ots=Kr49bI5Jat&sig=s6RCnAtwrzDRmbuTy5w3RBD_uY4&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22charlotte%20serber%22&f=false)

