Robert A. Schluter, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, November 4, 2002: Saving the legacy tape no. 548 and 549

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ROB RT HL T R MB R 4 2002 th c r wh n I ent it ut. It was lectronic ounting . It wa a ry arly b k n nuclear e1g r c unters and circuit . And so I just order d it fr m Wil y r m pla . It came. It should not have happened, but did happen and I don't think anyon notic d. r they may have noticed that certain types of books were being ordered by Los Alamos. But it was a post office box in Santa Fe. I remember being excited in the library. I read Oswald Spengler's book, "The Decline of the West," which was extremely interesting. I set out to memorize Shakespeare, some sonnets and so forth. I thought that a well­educated person would know these things. BEC: That's interesting. You talked about the barracks for the thirty or so folks who lived inside the gate? ROB: In the summer of 1945 they were tooling up, sort of, for production, I guess. In the 1nachine shop they were making these spherical bowls for explosives and so forth. That was separate. They brought in people with a blue badge. I had a white badge; that's a staff badge. I could have gone to any library on the site, read about all kinds of things, but I had other things to do and just being in on the secrets was not all that attractive or interesting. When they got these people in for production in 1945, many were in or near my barracks. Greenglass came in this group of machinists. He's a famous (infamous) person. He was a machinist in the army and he came in this machine shop. They couldn't go all over the lab; they just worked in the machine shop. He was the brother of Mrs. Rosenberg, the Rosenberg situation. Maybe he was in the end of the barracks I was in. He was filthy as could be. He'd leave sausage around. He was a very loud-mouthed individual, extremely left-wing. He was for Hemy Wallace, and he was just obviously offensive. He was a machinist and I don't think he knew very much, but he then, of 42