Dr. Mark Kelley mother worked for the Manhattan Project in the head offices in Washington, DC from 1942 to 1946. Her responsibility as a clerical worker was to classify thousands of documents (Top Secret, Classified) passing through General Groves' office in DC as Oppenheimer and company worked to beat Germany to the atomic bomb. It was his mother's first job right out of high school, and unlike the young women who worked at Oak Ridge, TN did not know they were part of a weapons project, my mother knew exactly what we were doing and had some terrifying moments along the way.

After the Trinity Test (of the first bomb), someone brought radioactive slag (Trinitite) from the test site to the DC offices in a wooden box, which sat by his mother's desk for an extended period of time. No one warned the staff of the dangers of radiation, and as a result, his mother died at the age of 59 of the same type of cancer that developed in Japanese citizens exposed to the fall-out from the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

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