The Los Alamos Bushy-Tailed Mushroom Security Memo

Shortly before I joined the Los Alamos Lab (1974), there appeared a series of documents about various subjects at the Lab called "The Bushy-Tailed Mushroom" series. The documents were unofficial parodies of things going on at the Lab and were identified with a hand-drawn mushroom cloud in the to/from/subject header of the documents. Unfortunately, I did not think to save a copy as they were often very funny. They were just close enough to reality to be almost believable. Too believable in one case.

For instance, there was a Bushy-Tailed Mushroom funding request in the style of LDRD (Lab Directed Research and Development for high risk but high reward projects)  ostensibly from the "Western Exploration Division" WX  (Weapons Experiments in reality). The proposal was dated in the 1490's by some Italian chap and concerned an ingenious plan to try and reach the East Indies by sailing WEST instead of east. The proposal listed the resources necessary and concluded that, while expensive, if it were successful it would open up a whole New World of trade possibilities.

There was another Bushy-Tailed Mushroom memo ostensibly from Los Alamos computer code developers to Los Alamos computer code users. (I was in a code development group, so the memo hit pretty close to home.) The memo had a list of perhaps 30 useful code notes from the developers to the users. My favorite code note to the users was something like "As usual, a punch in column 37 of the 54th input card is ignored."

The Bushy-Tailed Mushroom memo ostensibly from Lab Security terminated the series when a PhD physicist missed the bushy-tailed mushroom cloud in the memo's header. Security routinely sent out memos with security policies that did not always comport with the scientists' view of reasonable policies, so the fact that the memo was suggesting inane things did not tip off the physicist that this was parody. In this case, it was a little too close to reality ...

The physicist (my alternate group leader by coincidence) read item after item of inane security policies and got angrier and angrier. Somewhere down the list (10 perhaps?) he came across policies for protecting classified material that went something like this:

"A magnetic tape containing a classified computer code needs to be stored in a safe, as well as a computer listing of the computer code, as well as the punched cards associated with the computer code. Furthermore, inasmuch as the punch outs  at the computer card punch machines are a negative image of the computer cards, henceforth the punch outs must be treated as secret classified material and stored in an approved repository (safe)."

The physicist telephoned Security and told Security just what he thought of "their" insane memo.  Thus ended the Bushy-Tailed Mushroom document series.