> 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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXyUPYPwWbg&feature=youtu.be...
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.
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wife had at one point joined the Communist Party; in 1954, despite swearing loyalty to the U.S., his security clearance was revoked.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.
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.