The truck had come into Tanzania from neighboring Zambia, but had started its journey in the Congo. This was an echo of an incident three years prior in the town of Dodoma when a large cache of raw uranium, sealed in plastic containers, was confiscated. A United Nations panel came in to investigate and concluded the source of both shipments had been illegal mining at Shinkolobwe.
“The frequency of seized consignments in the Central African region leaves no doubt that the extraction and smuggling must be the result of organized efforts, and that these illegal activities must be highly rewarding financially,” said their final report. At least fifty cases of uranium and other radioactive material had been confiscated around the capital city of Kinshasa in the last eight years and even more was going undetected. “Such incidents are far more frequent than assumed,” said the inspectors.
The clandestine picking of uranium is not hard to conceal in the midst of so much other petty corruption. In most of Union Minière’s abandoned pits, there is an active hunt for what is called “Congo caviar”—the rich mineral blend of cobalt and copper harvested by scavengers and purchased by speculators. This activity is supposed to be illegal, but it has been widely tolerated for more than a decade. The miners work in T-shirts and flip-flops and dig out the chunks of “caviar” with shovels, picks, and their bare hands. Approximately fifty thousand to seventy thousand people are doing this on any given day.
The work is dark and dangerous. The miners sink handmade shafts that go perhaps forty feet down, then kink crazily in all directions. The horizontal chambers are known as galleries. They are no larger than crawl spaces; there is barely enough room to make a half swing with a pick. At least forty people a year are killed in tunnel collapses. There is little chance of underground rescue; the galleries become tombs. Giant fissures have appeared on the floor of some pits, indicating that the honeycomb of tunnels underneath has weakened the ground to the point of fracture and collapse.
Once mined, the caviar is packed into threaded plastic bags that resemble sacks of corn or wheat and sold to brokers called négociants, who turn around and sell to a trading company. The cobalt is particularly prized and fetches high prices. It is a vital metal in the construction of jet engines and turbines. Energy-hungry China is a primary buyer. But in the majority of cases the minerals leave the country illegally, without being recorded and without being taxed. The usual route is through Zambia. And at every step in this unofficial process, from the mine to the border, successive layers of police and inspectors demand a cut.
“Those who work in the sector have little choice in the matter; their ability to work, to buy and sell is dependent on paying these bribes,” reported the British advocacy group Global Witness. “The practice has become so institutionalized that it is no longer challenged.”
A freelance miner named Bedoin Numbei, whose T-shirt bore the legend ALADDIN, LAS VEGAS, told me this was true. He himself had snuck into the mine at Shinkolobwe to mine ore with the approval of the same guards who were supposed to be preventing this activity. “You just have to pay a little gift to the soldiers and you can go in there at night,” he told me.
A common joke among nuclear policy analysts is that the best way to move an atomic bomb across a national border is to hide it inside a truck-load of marijuana. In other words, smuggling routes used by average criminals provide good cover for the occasional piece of nuclear merchandise. This appears to have been the case at Shinkolobwe. A dossier from the government in Kinshasa reported that radioactive products, with no weights reported, have been sold in Katanga at prices ranging from $300 to $500 to a variety of traffickers from India, China, and Lebanon. Article Fifteen had been applied to more than just cigarettes, gasoline, and batteries. Uranium ore was now for sale.
After about two hours, we came to the remains of a metal fence nearly covered in the jacaranda trees on the side of the road.
“This was the beginning of the secure zone,” said Serge. He pointed out a small concrete foundation off to one side, also hidden in the brush. There were a few bricks scattered about. It appeared to have been a guardhouse.
Somwe took us down a winding path through man-high grass that eventually led into the ruins of a European-style village in a clearing among mango trees. We walked down a narrow lane that separated two rows of town houses. The walls had mostly collapsed, and those that stood upright were speckled with dark moss. Grass obscured the floors. A line of what had been streetlights was now just hollow steel stumps; the streetlights had been cut down like cornstalks. Mud huts of more recent construction were off to the side, their roofs missing. It felt as if we were walking through the leavings of a bygone civilization—a garrison on the Roman frontier, perhaps, or one of the forgotten silver villas in the Andes. But this was antiquity of the atomic age.
Somwe motioned us onward. We walked about a half mile down a concrete road, past mounds of black dirt, old slag. This was the outer fringe of what had been the B Zone, the heart of the uranium mining operation run by the Belgians fifty years ago. Shards of iron pipe and green chips of oxidizing copper lay scattered on the path. To the west were the metal skeletons of what had been a warehouse and a water tower.
When we passed through a gap in the trees, a panorama suddenly opened. Across a wide clearing in the forest, it was possible to see a line of trees a mile away, across a low man-made canyon whose sides were stained black and brown and whose bottom held pools of cloudy green water. This was the Shinkolobwe pit, the womb of the atomic bomb. On a different side of the world, a quarter million Japanese had been killed with the material from this cavity.
Clinging to the edge of the pit was a steel shaft. It was crowned with a slab of concrete, which gave it the appearance of a toadstool. This was one of the entrances that Union Minière had plugged in 1960, in an attempt to keep anyone from getting at the ore remaining inside. The shaft went almost six hundred feet down. There were no freelance miners anywhere in sight, but the soil in the center of the pit had been thoroughly worked over. Broken wood slats were littered about the slopes, the remnants of jerrybuilt mine works.
The three of us stood at the edge of the pit and looked in for a while. None of us spoke. A few fat cumulus clouds drifted overhead.
We were there for several minutes before I realized that I still had the “letter of authorization” from the police official in my backpack. I hadn’t needed to withdraw it because we hadn’t encountered a single roadblock. Nobody was guarding Shinkolobwe. We had walked right in.
2
BEGINNINGS
The story of the atomic bomb began in the Middle Ages, in a forest surrounded by mountains.
The range was known as Krušnè Hory, or the “Cruel Mountains,” because of the harsh winter winds and snows near the summits. They took on an even more melancholy appearance in the spring, when creeks drained snowmelt from the meadows and fog pooled in the valleys. Only bears, wolves, and a few tough hermits could live here. Because of the mountains’ obscurity, they became a hiding place for refugees during the religious wars of the fifteenth century, when the reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake in Prague and a radical sect of his followers, known as Taborites, started slaughtering their neighbors and then retreating into walled towns to wait for the end of the world.
Silver was discovered in a creek on the southern slope in the 1490s, which changed everything. Restless young men from farm villages flooded in to comb the forests for easy money; silver was said to be so plentiful that crumbs of it could be seen clinging to the roots of upended trees. When the surface ore ran out, the migrants started hacking into the slopes. They built rude cabins on the hillsides and smelters to roast the ore. The Czech historian Zbynek Zeman cites a pioneer song from the Cruel Mountains that captures the mad glee of that era:
Into the valley
Into the valley
With mothers
With all!
One local strongman, a count named Stephan Schlick, took over the valley in 1516 and start
ed cleaning up the mess. He hired some journey-men to stabilize the mine shafts and brought law and order to the ramshackle outpost that had taken root about halfway to the summit. Seeking a bit of class, he called his roaring camp St. Joachimsthal—or “Saint Joachim’s Valley”—after the father of the Virgin Mary.
The town quickly became the third most populous in all of Bohemia. Taverns sprang up on the valley bottom, where fog and hearth smoke and gases from the smelters thickened the air on cold days. Chicory stew and potatoes were the usual suppers. An early resident complained of “tricksters, riffraffs, and low-lives” as well as “lazy craftsmen, for whom the room and the stool were too hot.”
The silver in the valley made it an inviting military target, and so Count Schlick invested heavily in fortifications. On a promontory overlooking the valley, he built a stone castle with a deep cellar and told his metallurgists to start minting coins inside. The first silver disks they produced featured an engraving of the Bohemian king Ludwig I over the name of the town. More than that, they were big—larger and weightier than any other coin in circulation. Carrying one in a pocket made a person feel instantly rich. They became a regional sensation.
Count Schlick disappeared after marching off to fight the Turks in 1528, and his mines were eventually annexed by the Hapsburg house of Vienna, which ensured a wider reach for the valley’s silver (and handsome seigniorage for the royal sponsors). The big, heavy coins became a staple in market tills and court treasuries in France, Spain, and England. It was a publicity coup for the valley. Merchants began calling the coins Joachimsthalers, later shortened to “thalers,” which became bastardized to “dollars” in English-speaking regions.
In this way, the U.S. dollar took its linguistic roots from the mine shafts of St. Joachimsthal, which, in addition to a river of silver, yielded a curious material that stuck to the miners’ picks. Dark and greasy, it typically showed up in kidney-shaped blobs, with the neighboring rocks stained brilliant shades of green, orange, or yellow.
The miners nicknamed the stuff “pechblende” (the German word blende means “mineral,” while pech can mean both “tar” and “misfortune”; it was literally the “bad-luck rock”) and tossed it aside. Seeing this pechblende—the English word was pitchblende—was never welcome: It usually meant a particular vein of silver had been cleaned away, leaving nothing but mineral garbage, and the miners would have to endure the backbreaking chore of sinking another shaft.
When the silver ran out, the town nearly died. An epidemic of bubonic plague arrived in 1613 and an invading Swedish army sacked the town, reducing it to a valley of burned stumps. The watchtower stood half ruined. Crop failures had forced many to eat boiled hay and insects. Some of those who remained were also stricken by a mysterious disease called bergkrankheit, or “mountain disease,” which had started approximately fifteen years after the first shafts were dug. Nobody knew what caused it, though arsenic was suspected. Hundreds of people came down with a persistent hacking cough and spit up blood. Death arrived after a few pained months. The disease did not seem to be linked to the plague or to other common maladies of the lungs, but local physicians were at a loss as to how to treat or explain it. “Their lungs rot away,” reported Georgius Agricola, who theorized it was due to “pestilential air” in the shafts. But nobody thought to connect it to the velvety black rock.
More than a century later, a sample found its way to a thirty-seven-year-old Berlin pharmacist named Martin Klaproth, who had first studied to be a priest but taught himself chemistry while working as a clerk. He had already gained a small measure of local fame for exposing a scam against Empress Catherine II, who had paid for a remedy called nerve drops. Klaproth proved the drops were nothing more than a mixture of iron chloride and ether, and won the court’s gratitude.
In the spring of 1789, he examined the waste product from St. Joachimsthal and realized that, whatever the stuff was, it was associated with lead. When he heated it in solution, it produced a type of yellow crystal the pharmacist had never seen before. Klaproth added wax and a little oil to isolate a heavy grayish residue that he called “a new element which I see as a strange kind of half-metal.” Very strange, in fact: It created vibrant yellows and greens when added to glass.
Klaproth refused to name this new coloring agent after himself, as would have been the custom. He instead gave the honor to a new planet in the sky, Uranus, which had recently been discovered by an amateur astronomer in Britain. The new metal was called “uranium” until a more suitable moniker could be found. But none ever was.
The pharmacist had, indirectly, given the metal the name of the Hellenic sky god Uranus. According to the Greek creation story, Uranus had visited the earth every night to make love with the ground and bring forth children who would one day grow into the mutated Cyclops and the Titans. Uranus hated his own children and ordered them chained in a prison deep inside his wife, the earth. One of the most violent of his children rose up from his prison, castrated his father, Uranus, and tossed the severed penis and testicles into the sea. These organs grew into avenging spirits called Erinyes, or the Furies, who occasionally returned to earth for the persecution and damnation of men who upset the natural order.
One of the first people to see the danger of this new substance was not a scientist himself. He was instead a writer of science fiction.
Herbert George Wells was a schoolteacher and a drape hanger from a small town in Kent who found time in 1896 to write The Time Machine, a book that would make him famous. He wrote at a breakneck rate, turning out articles and books concerned with socialism, sexuality, violence, evolution, and, above all, man’s ability to claw his way upward with logic and technology. His novels, which he called “scientific romances,” echoed his politics. The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The First Men in the Moon, and The Invisible Man invoked fantastical or warped versions of the future to illuminate home truths about mankind.
As the likelihood of war fell over Europe in 1914, H. G. Wells retreated to a chateau in Switzerland and dashed off an antiwar novella he called The World Set Free. It is not so much a coherent story as it is a jumble of Wells’s political ideas, voiced by dull characters who are abandoned shortly after they are introduced. The plot spans thousands of years and is bound together with a single thread: an element called Carolinum, a fictional stand-in for uranium.
Wells somehow managed to make this mineral the only interesting character in his entire novella. Unstable at the core and casting off tiny bits of itself with each passing second, it first excites the imagination of a chemistry professor. “A little while ago, we thought of the atoms as we thought of bricks,” he tells his class, “as solid building material, as substantial matter, as vast masses of lifeless stuff, and behold! Those bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the intensest force!”
Before long, this secret is in the hands of scientists who, with deadly imagination, start making “atomic bombs” (Wells appears to be the first person in history to use this phrase). Two sets of allies, the Free Nations and the Central Powers, soon wage a nuclear war and turn each other’s capitals into lakes of flame. The heroic King Egbert rallies a council and resolves to safeguard the entire planet’s reserves of Carolinum. Whoever could control this rare metal, he realizes, could control the world. After escaping an assassination plot involving an atomic bomb planted in a hay lorry, King Egbert ushers in a paradise on earth, with the fatal element under permanent lock and key. Man had faced down a mineral demon.
Wells was a literary star of his day, but his novella sold poorly and was dismissed by the critics. The Times of London derided it as “a porridge composed of Mr. Wells’ vivid imagination, his discontents and his utopian aspirations.”
But at least one part of the narrative was faithful to reality: Wells had managed to write an accurate physical description of the faux uranium.
He had become fascinated with the emerging field of atomic physics after reading a copy of an academic treatise ca
lled The Interpretation of Radium, written by Frederick Soddy, a talented chemist from Cambridge, who had helped investigate the decay of thorium, uranium, and radium and concluded they were casting off tiny fragments he named alpha particles.
This disintegration did not seem to be occurring in the molecules, but rather inside the atom. Soddy estimated that the energy there must be enormous, perhaps as much as a million times greater than that of any other molecular change. This shakiness at the core of these atoms appeared to be so potent that, for Soddy, conventional physics could not make sense of it. In a speech to the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1904, he mused that a man who truly comprehended uranium could build a weapon that would destroy the earth. In a less belligerent vein, he predicted that a ton could light London’s lamps for a full year.
This speculation was possible only because of a lucky accident a few years before. A French chemist named Henri Becquerel heard reports of emissions from cathode tubes that had been nicknamed “X-rays,” the X being a placeholder for the unknown source of energy. Becquerel thought he might be able to solve the mystery by experimenting with various types of fluorescing substances. He sprinkled a little of the compound onto a photographic plate and exposed it to the sun outside the laboratory window.
When he tried a new type of salt—uranium potassium sulfate—a silhouette appeared on his plate. This was no surprise: Uranium was already known to fog photographs. Becquerel concluded that sunlight had triggered some kind of gaseous emission. The last days of February 1896 were gloomy and overcast in Paris, and Becquerel decided to suspend his experiments, leaving the plates carefully salted with uranium inside a drawer to await his return. When he did, he found a surprise. The photographic plates showed the same patterns as before. The fogging continued even in the dark—sunlight therefore had nothing to do with it. Whatever this was, it was no gas. This was a constant source of energy, indifferent to its environment. Its luminosity came from within.
Tom Zoellner Page 3