b. To speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make a contribution for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.
I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines, which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German UnderSecretary of State, Von Weisacker, is attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.
Yours very truly, Albert Einstein
Roosevelt handed the letter to his secretary Edwin “Pa” Wilson. “This needs action!” he said, and immediately authorized an ad hoc body called the Uranium Committee to examine the potential for building a weapon. But the Einstein letter did not work magic. There is no proof that Roosevelt even bothered to read it in full. The Uranium Committee was poorly funded (with an initial budget of $6,000) and led by career army men who were skeptical of the “magic bullet” the physicists were describing.
The British government, meanwhile—aided by the Bach-loving cartoonist Otto Frisch—was outpacing the Americans in both the imagination and the quality of the work. Frisch had been pondering the best way to remove the valuable U-235 from raw uranium and had arrived at the theoretical solution of mixing it with gaseous fluorine and forcing it through a tube with a heated rod in the center. If the tube walls were continuously cooled with water, the portion of the uranium with heavier isotopes would settle near the bottom while the lighter part could be harvested from the top. This method took advantage of the infinitesimal difference in weight between the quarry and its heavier relative, as when milk is separated from cream.
A simple idea, but extracting tiny amounts of U-235 in this fashion would be extremely time-consuming. A huge industrial facility would be needed to resolve the twenty-two pounds of U-235 judged necessary to achieve “critical mass”—that is, a lump of pure uranium so big that the neutrons would find more nuclei to smash than surface area to escape. This led to a joke among physicists. Why not just mail Adolf Hitler a dozen packages of uranium from different addresses? Each one would be brought to his desk for his personal inspection. When the last one arrived: Boom!
Critical mass, however, could never be achieved with raw uranium alone. And constructing a separation plant was a risky proposition in Britain, which was still in the bombsights of the Luftwaffe. Such a complex would consume enough electricity to light a city the size of Birmingham and cost up to $25 million, a sum the Crown could not afford to gamble on a theory, however promising. These recommendations were dutifully passed along to the United States, where they were systematically ignored.
“The minutes and reports had been sent to Lyman Briggs, who was the director of the Uranium Committee, and we were puzzled to receive virtually no comment,” recalled the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, who made multiple trips across the Atlantic in unheated bombers to shame “the cousins” into moving faster.
The complaints soon reached the ears of the White House, and control of what was called “the uranium question” was wrested from Briggs and transferred to the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, an innocuous-sounding body that was responsible for adding new weapons, such as sonar, radar, and amphibious vehicles, to the American arsenal. Its director, Vannevar Bush, had been kept in the dark about Einstein’s letter, but was quickly persuaded of the likelihood of a destructive energy release from a mass of enriched uranium.
And so, finally, the industrial and creative might of the United States began to awaken and apply itself to a crash program to build a uranium bomb. Bush was given authority to create a secret program code-named the Manhattan Engineer District, also known as the S-1 Project, and finally as simply the Manhattan Project. Its head would be General Leslie Richard Groves, an arrogant but supremely competent administrative wizard from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who had recently overseen the construction of the Pentagon. That concrete star now behind him, he longed for a command position on the battlefield and was dismayed to learn of his assignment to steer what he viewed as a futuristic long shot.
At 250 pounds, with a truck-tire stomach, a wave of greasy hair, and a dead-fish handshake, Groves was a West Point man with a bookkeeper’s thirst for minutiae and a mind that could graph a colossus from a few lines of statistics. He also had a total disregard for what people thought of him. His alkaline personality won him few friends (he was notorious for ordering colonels to pick up his dry cleaning), but it mattered little to him: He always favored prompt action over staff morale.
Groves’s chief deputy, Kenneth D. Nichols, perhaps the closest thing he had to a friend, called him “the biggest son of a bitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none, he had tireless energy; he was a big man, a heavy man but he never seemed to tire. . . . I hated his guts and so did everybody else, but we had our form of understanding.”
Groves had a mania for secrecy, and one of his first acts was ordering an information blackout, which extended to the popular media. One of the last stories to make it into print appeared in Coronet magazine in May 1942, under the headline URANIUM-235: CAN it win THE WAR? The reporter, Murray Teigh Bloom, estimated there was barely enough of the “magic metal” in America to be piled on top of a dime, but that “there is every likelihood cheap, almost inexhaustible atomic power will be achieved in the lifetimes of most of us.”
“I really got away with something,” Bloom said from his retirement home in Connecticut. “It was an exciting period, and I followed a hunch. It was too big a thing to keep secret.”
But with Groves in charge four months later, virtually all mentions of uranium disappeared from American technical journals. Editors were unwilling to disobey a Pentagon request in time of war, and Groves made a habit of paying rancorous personal visits to newspaper editors who ran with material he deemed compromising.
This was a gross overreaction. There was no real “secret” by this point. The physics of fission were public knowledge and well understood by scientists all over the world, as well as by the war departments of all the major combatants of World War II. “The bomb was latent in nature as a genome is latent in flesh,” wrote the historian Richard Rhodes. “Any nation might learn to command its expression.”
In Japan, the physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara lectured in 1941 on the possible development of a hydrogen bomb, using “super-explosive U-235” as the heating mechanism for the fusion of atoms. The Japanese army sent procurement officers to mines on the Korean peninsula to look for uranium. In Germany, the brilliant Werner Heisenberg envisioned using deuterium oxide—also called heavy water3—as a moderator to slow down the neutrons and create a more effective nuclear release. In France, a team of researchers led by Frédéric Joliot-Curie made a deal to secure fifty-five tons of uranium from Africa and discussed the possibility of testing an atomic weapon in the emptiness of the Sahara. In Russia, Igor Kurchatov had taken note of Frisch’s article in Nature and told his government he feared that Germany or the United States would soon be collecting uranium, either for power or for weaponry. He later formed a committee to study ways to separate U-235; a senior deputy was moved to complain that younger Russian scientists “were so captivated by uranium projects that they forgot about the needs of the present day.”
Yet all of these world powers were taxed and distracted by war and ultimately could not commit to an expensive theory, however promising it may have seemed. The embryonic nuclear programs in each of them suffered from lack of manpower, lack of money, lack of electrical power for isotopic separation, and, especially in the case of Germany, lack of support from the head of state. The führer was generally suspicious of technology a
nd dismissed the idea of a uranium bomb as the “spawn of Jewish pseudo-science.”
Building the bomb was now more of a bureaucratic matter than a scientific one. The job of cracking the subatomic code was finished. It now came down to finding raw uranium in the ground, using brute industrial force to pull it apart, and then sculpting it in a precise globular shape for maximum fatal impact.
The physicist Ed Creutz expressed this recipe in stark terms during a meeting with a White House official. He made a cup with his hands about the size and shape of a baseball.
“All I need is a lump of uranium as big as this,” he said. “But I need it now.”
3
THE BARGAIN
Shinkolobwe was a perverse miracle, a globule of radioactivity that had burbled up from deep in the earth’s crust five million years ago. Like most uranium deposits, it had seeped upward in carbonate solution and become trapped in the sinews of clays and granites. But its purity was more than two hundred times that of most uranium deposits. This would turn out to be a unique occurrence in the history of the planet, and now it stood as the best chance for the United States to gain a chokehold on world supply.
This prize had been found in the midst of the African bush in 1915 by the Belgian monopoly company Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which had inherited vast plains of mineral-rich territory from King Leopold. The company hired a swarm of inexperienced young men to explore the region, one of them an affable and unambitious Oxford graduate named Robert Rich Sharp, whose geological training had consisted of a single class. He took to the lifestyle immediately, and his native companions took to calling him Mlundavalu, which means “man who covers the country.” On one of his treks, he happened to walk over the purest deposit of uranium anywhere in the world. Stories later circulated that Sharp had heard reports of African hunters smearing themselves with a colorful luminescent mud and had gone out to investigate. But Shinkolobwe’s discovery was much more prosaic. While inspecting some properties of minor importance, Sharp climbed a short hill for a view.
“I was idly poking about on top when something yellow caught my eye,” Sharp said later. He had seen uranium samples in a museum and now suspected the exotic mineral of creating the palette of colors on top of the hill.
Where uranium could be found, its daughter product, radium, would be sprinkled within. That spelled money. The boulders scattered at the base could have been worth as much as $2 million each. Sharp found a zinc plate, used a penknife to scratch out the word RADIUM in letters six inches high, and mounted the sign atop the hill. A sample of the yellow rock was sent in for assay, and when it indeed proved to be uranium, the claim was given the name of the nearby village: Shinkolobwe, “the fruit that scalds.”
A black workforce was recruited and contained inside a sealed compound, near a manager’s village of brick houses and streetlights. The mine opened for business in 1922 and began to flood the market with medicinal radium, putting the competition at St. Joachimsthal nearly out of business. All the profits flowed upward, first to Union Minière and then to its mammoth holding company, the Société Générale, which had inherited most of King Leopold’s plantation and ran it with a lighter touch, albeit with the same forced-labor policies.
“The Congo can best be understood as the private preserve and reservation of S.G. [Société Générale],” noted one American intelligence brief. “For all major practical considerations, S.G. is the Congo.” Locals in Katanga often spoke of the company in terms interchangeable with the colonial government, and its influence over the financial houses of Europe was said to have equaled that of the Rothschild family or the J. P. Morgan banking empire.
The man who had oversight of the Congo’s new treasure was Edgar Sengier, the portly and dapper director of Union Minière. He had started his career as a tramway engineer in China and had risen to the top of the Belgian mining giant. Sengier belonged to the best gentlemen’s clubs in Britain and France and enjoyed excellent wine wherever he went. His suits were bespoke and always sparkling clean. His skin was china pale, he walked with a slight mince, and his silver mustache was always trimmed sharp; it was his custom to send a bouquet of pink carnations to the wives of men with whom he dined. Sengier was sometimes described (with only partial exaggeration) as one of the most powerful men in the world. He had direct control of 7 percent of the world’s copper and almost all of its cobalt. And every aspect of this empire was subject to his micromanagement. “Never allow a lawyer to draw up a contract,” he once confided to an acquaintance. “Always write it yourself. Then you will know exactly what it means.”
As Europe began sliding toward war in the late 1930s, the market for radium began to suffer, and Sengier closed down the Shinkolobwe mine. He neglected to have it pumped, and the pit flooded with dirty water. A visitor described it as “a gray ulcer.” Piles of surplus ore, which had been painstakingly sorted by Congolese hands, sat in a nearby warehouse. The drills and carts were transferred to nearby copper mines; the ore muckers were all fired and sent home.
Sengier would learn that his Congo property could turn out to be interesting after all. During a trip to London in 1939, he was introduced, through a friend, to Sir Henry Tizard, the director of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, who had been briefed about uranium’s propensity to undergo chain reaction. He asked Sengier, casually, if he would be willing to give the British government an option on his inventory, which then amounted to nearly six thousand pounds. Tizard made only passing reference to the encounter in his diary, and the price he named is lost to history, but Sengier must not have thought much of it because he refused the offer and did not attempt to haggle. But Tizard made a memorable remark at the end of their meeting, one that Sengier never forgot. “Be careful, and never forget that you have something which may mean a catastrophe to your country and to mine if this material was to fall into the hands of a possible enemy.”
This was a strange comment: If the British really believed this to be so, why were they not offering a better price?
Sengier’s suspicions were reinforced only a few days later when a delegation from France, led by Joliot-Curie, came to see him with an ambitious idea to test a uranium bomb in the Sahara. They offered generous terms, which he accepted: Union Minière would receive half the royalties on any patents resulting from their experiments. This deal was quashed after the Nazis invaded Belgium in May 1940. Heaps of yellow uranium ore on the docks became the immediate property of Adolf Hitler.
But Hitler missed acquiring the largest part of Shinkolobwe’s inventory, which in a lucky accident for the United States had already been hidden inside a warehouse in New York City.
Edgar Sengier hated the Nazis and had guessed they would probably invade Belgium on their way into France. He also guessed, correctly, that war would be excellent business and that he could best conduct his trade in the United States, which would soon become the world’s biggest user of cobalt, a vital metal for the assembly of aircraft engines. Sengier rented a permanent suite for himself and his wife at the Ambassador Hotel in New York and set up an office-in-exile in the Cunard Building at 25 Broadway for a front company called African Metals Corporation. His native Belgium might now have been decorated with swastikas, but his company’s grid of mines, mills, and railways in the Congo was still operational and eager to do business with the war machine stirring itself to life.
Sengier did not forget the uranium. He arranged the barreling of the remaining inventory at Shinkolobwe—about 1,250 tons—and had it railed to the port at Lobito. This was done without notice or fanfare to throw off any Nazi informants. The barrels were loaded onto two separate freighters and taken across the Atlantic to Staten Island, New York, where they were stored in a three-story warehouse on the site of a vegetable oil plant run by Archer Daniels Midland, near the southern footing of the Bayonne Bridge. It was the only place Sengier’s deputies could find on short notice. Each barrel was stamped with the plain legend URANIUM ORE—PRODUCT OF BELGIAN CONGO.
With an enormous budget at his disposal and the backing of the White House, Groves would soon be on his way to making deals with some of the largest chemical and engineering corporations in America: Bechtel, DuPont, Raytheon, Eastman Kodak, and Union Carbide would all be hired to erect the continental apparatus needed to produce the atomic bomb. But raw uranium was the first concern. The only domestic supply was inside old slag heaps in the Colorado mountains. Union Minière had effectively killed the American radium business twenty years before, at the same time it destroyed the prominence of St. Joachimsthal.
Groves sent his chief deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols (the one who privately considered his boss a “son of a bitch”), to Manhattan on September 18, 1942, to buy whatever uranium he could from the Belgian company. An elegant man in his sixties was there to greet him.
“He had a somewhat pallid face and his light hair was thinning,” recalled Nichols. “He was immaculately dressed and he spoke excellent English in rather curt sentences.”
Tom Zoellner Page 6