ABSTRACT
On one typically crystalline August afternoon at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1994, I received a call from my secretary. She informed me that my long-awaited United States Department of Energy (DOE) security “Q” clearance had arrived, allowing me access to documents and conversations for a classified history project to which I had been assigned.1 I could now actually visit my secretary, Mildred*, and my immediate supervisor, John*, whose office was until then in a building off-limits to me. John had instructed the secretary to tell me to pick up my new identification badge, then meet him at the entrance gate at the main Administration Building, where I was to move into a new office that was, as they said, “behind the fence.”
