Seven Elements That Have Changed the World

by John Browne

  But storing silver was very costly; to stop their wealth being eroded, the Hunts needed prices to increase, not just hold steady. Fortunately a combination of the Hunts’ bullish behaviour on silver, new big buyers in the market and the general trend in commodity prices during the high inflation of the 1970s led to just that. Between 1970 and 1973 the price of silver doubled, rising to $3 an ounce, and by autumn 1979 it had reached $8 an ounce. Then suddenly in September it leapt to over $16 an ounce. As a result of their buying, the Hunts faced investigation by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). The CFTC was growing worried that a silver squeeze (in which insufficient bullion is available to meet future contracts) could be on the horizon, and so they asked the Hunts to sell some of their silver. The Hunts abhorred federal interference and, characteristically, declined.

  Instead they kept on buying. By the end of that year, the Hunts controlled 90 million ounces of bullion in the US, with another 40 million hidden in Europe and another 90 million through futures contracts. On the last day of 1979 the price had reached $34.45 an ounce. By the beginning of 1980, the CFTC became increasingly worried and determined that the Hunts were ‘too large relative to the size of the US and world silver markets’.58 Backed by the CTFC, the trading market announced new limits restricting traders to no more than 10 million ounces’ worth of future contracts. But still the price kept rising and the Hunts kept buying silver outright. On 17 January the price reached a new high of $50 an ounce. At this point, the Hunts had silver holdings worth nearly $4.5 billion and their unrealised profit on this was around $3.5 billion.59 The authorities reacted four days later by closing down the silver futures market, with disastrous consequences for the Hunts.60 The price of silver plummeted to $34 an ounce, levelling out in this region for the rest of the month. The price was partly kept down by people selling scrap silver, digging out old silver dinner place settings to melt into bullion. ‘Why would anyone want to sell silver to get dollars?’ asked Bunker. ‘I guess they got tired of polishing it.’61 The Hunts kept taking delivery of their contracts, now holding stock of over 155 million ounces. They had faith in the long-term price of silver and tried to turn the price decline around. By 14 March the price of silver had fallen to $21 an ounce. On 25 March, the Hunts realised they no longer had the resources to keep making margin calls. Bunker sent a message to Herbert: ‘Shut it down.’ Their brokerage firm called asking for a further payment of $135 million to maintain the futures contracts. Herbert told them that they could not pay and that they would have to begin selling; as they did, panic took over the market. On Thursday 27 March, ‘Silver Thursday’, the silver market collapsed, falling to $10.80 an ounce. The Dow Jones dropped twenty-five points to its lowest level in five years. To pay their debts, the Hunts had to keep selling their silver, depressing the price further. And they also had to pledge their personal possessions, including ‘thousands of ancient coins from the 3rd century BC, sixteenth-century antiques, Greek and Roman statuettes of bronze and silver … a Rolex watch, and a Mercedes-Benz automobile’.62

  The Hunts had made billions in profit on their investment, and now had lost it all. Bunker Hunt was twice the world’s richest private individual (once by oil, once by silver) and twice had lost his fortune.63 He still believed the price of silver would rise again, predicting it would one day reach $125 an ounce. But silver had probably had its last gasp. The Hunts’ actions in the silver market put them in the media spotlight, where they were portrayed as greedy and conniving. They were hounded by the press, but as Bunker Hunt told a friend: ‘At least I know they’re using a little bit of silver every time they take my picture.’64

  Silver where?

  Since the first Kodak came on to the market in 1888, cameras and silver halide film had spread throughout the world. In 1980 silver images were more prolific than ever before. However, only thirty years later, this would all change. The 2012 Oscar’s ceremony took place, unusually, without a sponsor. Kodak, whose name had been associated with the awards since 2000, had gone bankrupt. The pioneers of affordable cameras and film had failed to keep up with the shift to digital photography. On the red carpet, the press pack did not even use the tiniest bit of silver each time they took a photograph. In 2012, the silicon CCD chip was the medium of choice for recording images. Silver changed so much of our world, not only as a store of value but also as the essential ingredient in a technology allowing us to capture images of history. Silver-halide photography had a remarkable 150-year impact on the history of human invention, but that had now largely come to an end. While our reverence for gold, ‘the sweat of the Sun’, remains the same today as it did three millennia ago, we shed a tear for the ‘tears of the Moon’ and its gradual demise as an element which changed the world.65

  URANIUM

  The bomb

  28 OCTOBER 2011: I am standing outside the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, Japan. A plaque, 100 metres to the north-east of the museum, marks the hypocentre of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m., 6 August 1945.1 Seventy thousand people died as a direct result of the explosion and many more died later from their burns and radiation sickness. The entire city was obliterated.2

  The Peace Park’s central boulevard points me towards the Atomic Bomb Dome, next door to the ‘T’-shaped Aioi Bridge which served as the aiming point for the crew that dropped the bomb. The Dome was one of the few buildings left standing after the blast and the fires which swept through the city. The hollow, twisted structure has been kept in its bombed state as a lasting reminder of the destructive potential of atomic and nuclear weapons and as a memorial to those who lost their lives. But around the Atomic Bomb Dome and symbolically flat Peace Park, the city has been reborn. By 1955 the population of the city had surpassed the level reached before the bomb was dropped. Skyscrapers now dominate the skyline and the starkly contrasting Dome seems to have become ever smaller through the decades of Japan’s post-war economic miracle.

  In front of me is a sea of matching yellow, blue and green hats. Each day hundreds of school children visit the Peace Park. Some laugh and play games while others listen intently to their teachers. The Peace Bell frequently chimes out across the park as small groups take it in turns to swing the wooden ringer. They are all here for one reason: to learn about the tragic events of the day the bomb was dropped and why it must never happen again.

  On display inside the museum is a collection of pictures made by Hiroshima survivors.3 The images were produced decades after the bomb, but memories of that day are clearly still sharp. The individual hurt and terror is magnified as I move from picture to picture. The collection forms a partial documentary of human suffering. Drawn by the hands of survivors and registering what had been burnt in their minds, the images make a greater impact than that of any photograph. Many did not get to tell their story: a burial mound in the park still holds the cremated remains of thousands of unnamed victims.

  The simplest images are the most affecting. In the middle of one blank white page sits a coarse black ball, limbs barely discernible. The flash of the atomic bomb was so quick that there was no time for any cooling to take place; asphalt boiled and skin simply burnt. The witness to this event continues: ‘The whole body was so deeply charred that the gender was unrecognizable – yet the person was weakly writhing. I had to avert my eyes from the unbearable sight, but it entrenched itself in my memory for the rest of my life.’4

  The Hiroshima survivors cannot forget; we must ensure that we do not forget.

  At a dinner several weeks earlier, I had heard George Shultz, the former US Secretary of State, say that the abolition of nuclear weapons was his essential motivation.5 At the time, I had not fully understood his drive, but as I stood in the Peace Park reflecting on the events of sixty-six years ago, it became clear to me. I felt the same when I had visited the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with my mother. Almost all her family died in the Second World War. She herself survived Auschwitz. Humans cannot be treated like vermin to
be eradicated. The Holocaust was a planned programme of inhuman events for an evil reason; the Hiroshima bomb was a single dreadful event to stop a continuing inhuman war. I cried, much as I did when I saw my mother put a candle on the Auschwitz memorial. And I remembered my mother telling me off as we left the museum with a question and a statement. ‘Why are you crying? It is just a museum. There is no noise and it does not smell.’ And in that way she reminded me that there is no room for sentimentality, only clear-eyed realism.

  Hiroshima most vividly illustrates that our use of the elements holds the potential for great evil as well as great good. The atomic bomb harnessed the incomparable energy of uranium; unleashed over Hiroshima in August 1945, it changed the world forever.6

  Splitting the atom

  Uranium was first mined as part of a greasy mineral called pitchblende, or ‘bad luck rock’. During the Middle Ages, among the Cruel Mountains of the Kingdom of Bohemia, silver miners would thrust their pickaxes deep into the rock face only to pull out a clod of this unfortunate ore. When pitchblende was found it usually meant the end of a particular vein of silver and so the beginning of more back-breaking work digging a new mining shaft.

  For centuries, uranium was discarded as waste, but, at the turn of the twentieth century, it became an ore of great scientific interest. It was from uranium salts that, in February 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered natural radiation. He placed some uranium salt on a photographic plate and a silhouette soon appeared. This effect was not considered unusual. Uranium had long been known to affect film in this way and Becquerel thought it to be a result of a chemical reaction triggered by sunlight. Because the next few days in Paris became overcast, Becquerel decided to suspend his experiments. He placed the photographic plates and uranium salts in a drawer. Returning days later he saw that the plates had mysteriously captured the same silhouettes. There had been no sun to make the images and so something else, intrinsic to the uranium, had made them. This he called radiation.

  Fellow Parisian Marie Curie heard of Becquerel’s discovery. To experiment further, Curie acquired a ton of pitchblende, still regarded as useless rock, free of charge from the Cruel Mountain region. This she used to obtain enough uranium salts to demonstrate that the amount of radiation emitted depends only on the mass of uranium. It did not matter whether it was solid or a powder, or exposed to heat or light. Her experiments led to her hypothesis that radiation comes from within the atom itself, rather than some chemical process between atoms. This radiation was the first sign of instability within the uranium atom.

  Curie went on to discover two more radioactive elements, radium and polonium, and in 1903, along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Yet both Marie and Pierre Curie paid the price of their radioactive research. They succumbed to strange and, for Marie, fatal illnesses of a mysterious origin. Today we know that these resulted from radiation exposure, which at first was not known to be harmful.7

  I first learnt of uranium’s mysterious properties while reading Natural Sciences at Cambridge in the late 1960s. It was there, forty years earlier, that many of the pioneering experiments in the newly emerging field of nuclear physics had taken place. In 1920, Ernest Rutherford, ‘the father of nuclear physics’ and then the director of the Cavendish Laboratory, had hypothesised that the atom was made not only of negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons bound together by their opposite charges, but also of a neutral particle which he called a neutron.8 Twelve years later, James Chadwick, assistant director of the Cavendish under Rutherford, proved the neutron’s existence.9 It would turn out to be the key to splitting uranium atoms.

  By the time I arrived at Cambridge, the Cavendish Laboratory had lost much of its reputation for nuclear physics. One exception was the presence of Otto Frisch, a nuclear physicist who had played an active role in the Manhattan Project which produced the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Years before, it was Frisch’s interpretation of an unusual experimental result that, at a very basic level, provided the basis for the creation of the atomic bomb.

  In 1938, Frisch was staying in Sweden over Christmas with his aunt and fellow physicist Lise Meitner. Meitner had been working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Dahlem, Germany, but had fled to Sweden earlier that year fearing persecution under the Third Reich. Her German colleagues, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, were keeping her updated on the progress of their research and in their latest correspondence told her of a very strange experimental result. When they fired neutrons at uranium atoms they detected signs of much lighter particles, almost half the weight of a uranium nucleus, in the debris.10 It did not make sense: the neutrons did not have nearly enough energy to break off such large chunks of atom. They decided to go for a long walk to puzzle it out.

  Walking through the frozen Swedish countryside with Meitner and his aunt, it occurred to Frisch that the uranium nucleus must be very unstable. Uranium atoms are so large that the glue holding the protons and neutrons together is only just enough to withstand the repulsive force of charged protons pushing against each other.11 If a uranium nucleus absorbs a passing neutron, the energy is enough to destabilise the atom and split it. While he explained his reasoning to Meitner, both stopped and sat down on a tree trunk and began scribbling on bits of paper. They calculated that the uranium nucleus resembled ‘a very wobbly, unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation’.12 Frisch carried out further experiments to confirm this idea before he and Meitner submitted two papers to the scientific journal Nature in February 1939. In these, Frisch gave this newly observed event of splitting the name ‘nuclear fission’.13

  In nuclear fission a vast amount of energy is released. When a uranium atom splits it produces two smaller nuclei with a smaller total mass. The missing mass (m), which is about one-fifth of that of a proton, is converted into energy (E) according to Einstein’s equation E = mc2. Because the speed of light (c) is so fast (299,792,458 metres every second) a little mass makes a lot of energy. Frisch calculated that the splitting of a single uranium atom would be enough to make a grain of sand, itself containing around one hundred trillion atoms, visibly jump in the air.

  But one uranium atom does not make a bomb. The explosion in Hiroshima resulted from the simultaneous splitting of some of the thousand trillion trillion atoms contained in one kilogram of uranium.14 The splitting of a single uranium atom produces neutrons which, if travelling at the right speed, cause neighbouring uranium atoms to split as well. These produce more neutrons which in turn split more uranium atoms. This leads to an unstoppable chain reaction. Thus, uranium is literally regarded as the master of its own destruction.

  Meitner and Frisch had unlocked the secret of splitting the atom. At the time, they did not understand that their discovery would enable the creation of a nuclear bomb which could be used to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

  No explosion was observed in Meitner’s laboratory. It turned out that the chain reaction could only be sustained with a specific type of uranium atom, a type which is rarely found in nature. Naturally occurring uranium is almost entirely made up of the isotope uranium-238.15 However, in order to create a chain reaction, which results in a nuclear explosion, a high concentration of the fissionable isotope uranium-235 is needed. This is called ‘enriched-uranium’.16

  Building a city

  At Columbia University in New York, Hungarian and Italian physicists Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi heard of Meitner and Frisch’s research and began conducting their own experiments in nuclear fission. After moving to the University of Chicago they built the world’s first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, in an old squash court under a football stadium at the university. This did not escape the attention of the Soviet intelligence agencies, but developments got somewhat lost in translation: the Soviets mistranslated ‘squash court’ as ‘pumpkin field’, mistaking the game of squash for the eponymous vegetable. The location of the experiment was irrelevant, though, in stark
contrast to its results. From the large number of neutrons released in the fission reactions, Szilárd concluded that uranium would be able to sustain a chain reaction, and so possibly could be used to create a bomb. He later recalled: ‘there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.’17

  At the beginning of the Second World War Szilárd decided that the discovery should be urgently brought to the attention of President Roosevelt.18 He drafted a letter, which was also signed by Albert Einstein, explaining the possibility of this new type of bomb and warning that Germany could be pursuing research with this aim in mind. Roosevelt agreed to the formation of the Advisory Committee on Uranium and, later, the allocation of increased funding for uranium research. As the science behind atomic explosions became more concrete, and as the urgency of the matter increased with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, the diverse nuclear research in the US was consolidated and directed towards the single aim of producing an atomic bomb under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project.