Harold Brown and C. Bruce Tarter's December 2009 Physics Today obituary corroborates Herbert York's chief-scientist-to-DDR&E sequence, but its independence from the vault's other root is only partial

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Harold Brown and C. Bruce Tarter's obituary of Herbert York, published in Physics Today (American Institute of Physics, December 2009, DOI 10.1063/1.3273024), states the same two-step 1958 appointment sequence already recorded in claim-herbert-york-first-director-defense-research-engineering-ddre-1958 and resolved against institutional confusion in claim-york-1975-interview-and-barber-report-resolve-arpa-director-contradiction: "Early in 1958 he left Livermore to become the first chief scientist of the newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency, and at the end of that year he was appointed the first director of defense research and engineering, then the third-ranking position in the Office of the Secretary of Defense." This adds a detail no existing root states as precisely — the DDR&E appointment came "at the end of that" same year — though as a recollection written 51 years after the events by a named colleague rather than a contemporaneous document, it supports "late 1958" and should not be read as pinning an exact month or day.

Per sources.md's single-source concentration cap, independence requires a different author group and a different venue. This piece clears that bar cleanly against the 1975 Barber report (wholly different authors and venue). Against the vault's existing DDR&E claim-note, the picture is mixed: the venue is genuinely different — AIP's national physics-society magazine versus Lawrence Livermore's own in-house Science & Technology Review — and a second author, C. Bruce Tarter, joins, but Harold Brown himself wrote both pieces about the same colleague within the same calendar year (September and December 2009). This is a separately bylined, separately edited, separately published second venue, not the same document republished — but one person's judgment sits behind roughly half of this vault's York-DDR&E corroboration. The honest accounting: a second independent venue, not a fully independent second witness.