Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  After inspecting the colonel’s military ID, Sengier asked with an acid tone: “Are you a contracting officer? Too many people have been around here about this uranium, and they just want to talk. Do you have any authority to buy?”

  “Yes, I have more authority, I’m sure, than you have uranium to sell,” said Nichols.

  “Will the uranium be used for military purposes?” Sengier demanded, and Nichols hesitated, knowing he could not discuss the secret project.

  “You don’t need to tell me how you’ll use it,” Sengier said. “I think I know. When do you need it?”

  “If it wasn’t impossible, I’d say tomorrow.”

  “It’s not impossible. You can have immediately one thousand tons of uranium ore.” The Belgian then told him of the unguarded stockpile sitting barely eight miles away, inside a vegetable oil plant.

  “I have been waiting for your visit,” he added, and took out a yellow legal pad and a pencil.

  Nichols left the office thirty minutes later, carrying a sheet of scratch paper that formed the beginning of a covenant between Union Minière and the United States that would last for the next eighteen years. The barrels of uranium were immediately taken to a military depot in New Jersey. Additional shipments from Shinkolobwe were ordered, an average of four hundred tons of uranium oxide per month loaded onto fast freighters that could outrun German U-boats. Only one of them would ever be lost to torpedoing.

  Payouts to Union Minière were made through a dummy account at Bankers Trust Company, which at one point contained $37.5 million. “There was to be a minimum of correspondence on the subject and the auditors were directed to accept Sengier’s statements without explanation,” noted Groves. At $1.04 per pound, the price was slightly inflated, but Groves had a bottomless budget, and uranium now appeared to be the possible savior of the Allied cause and the energy source of the future. Groves said later in his memoirs, “Its value had never been determined in the open market, and now there was only one purchaser and one seller.”

  With the New York barrels safely locked down, the United States set about denying uranium to the rest of the world. It was thought at the time that uranium was a geologically rare element, found only in select locations. He who controlled the uranium deposits, therefore, ought to be able to control the world after the war was over. This was the philosophy behind a clandestine survey of global uranium reserves, conducted for the Manhattan Project by Major Paul L. Guarin, a Texan who had worked as a geologist for Shell Oil before the war and possessed a swashbuckling temperament that suited Groves, who remarked, “I did not want anyone who would always insist on 100 percent proof before making a move.” Under the code name “Murray Hill Area,” after a neighborhood in Manhattan, Guarin hired consultants from Union Carbide to comb about sixty-seven thousand geological volumes, assay soil samples from twenty friendly or neutral countries, and study new methods for identifying uranium ore deposits. Nations were then cataloged according to their uranium-bearing potential. The only one that rated “excellent” was the Belgian Congo. Listed as “good” were Canada, the United States, and Sweden; and judged “fair” were Czechoslovakia, Portugal, and South Africa. The USSR and Bulgaria were marked as “unknown.”

  “All other countries appear to have very poor production possibilities,” concluded the final report. This was based entirely on Leslie Groves’s working assumption that just a few places in the earth’s crust—such as Colorado and Shinkolobwe—had been endowed with the volatile element. He believed that even the massive territory of the USSR concealed no appreciable uranium and, as a result, that it would likely take the Soviets at least twenty years to build their own atomic bomb. Cornering the world’s uranium, therefore, meant that the United States should be able to preserve an atomic monopoly for decades to come.

  This was a bad miscalculation. Uranium turned out to be more common than tin, and nearly five hundred times more abundant than gold. At least a hundred billion tons of reserves are now known to exist, including substantial holdings in Russia. Richard Rhodes summarized Groves’s quest thusly: “He might as well have tried to hoard the sea.”

  There was not nearly enough ore in the New York barrels to make a bomb, and so Sengier had to be persuaded to reopen the Shinkolobwe mine, which was full of dirty water. The Belgian showed himself to be a tough negotiator; humorous but brittle. “Well, General,” he asked Groves at the beginning of their meeting, “are we going to play poker or are you going to show your cards?”off

  Sengier refused the initial offers, but was persuaded to change his mind in 1943 after he was offered an exclusive buying contract and the free construction assistance of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which would drain the water from the pit. He thereby managed to squeeze out a major financial gift. The United States would pour $13 million into retooling Shinkolobwe—in effect, subsidizing a global monopoly on uranium for the Belgian owners.

  A U.S. Army private named Joe Volpe was sent out to inspect the property, and he found the mine office in Elisabethville full of uranium rocks. They were samples designed to impress visitors with their colorful staining.

  “Don’t you boys know that this stuff will make you sterile?” he asked, only half joking.

  The Belgian managers replied—somewhat defensively—that they had already fathered several children. But when Volpe returned to the office on another visit, he saw that the samples had disappeared.

  A unit of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services was sent into the Congo to watch the site for any signs of Nazi sabotage. A young diplomatic officer named Robert Laxalt recalled meeting the head of the unit in Léopoldville in 1944, a man with a “sphinx face” and “the most piercing eyes I have ever encountered.” The spy imprudently revealed his mission one night: “There’s something in that mine that both the United States and Germany want more than anything else in the world. The Shinkolobwe mine contains a mineral called ‘uranium.’ The Congo has the only producing mine.”

  British agents were also lurking inside Czechoslovakia during the war, monitoring St. Joachimsthal for any signs of large-scale digging. This was thought to be a sure sign that Hitler, too, had made progress on an atomic bomb. But that trip wire was never activated. “Tailings piles from each mine were microscopically measured from one reconnaissance to the next,” wrote Groves. “There were no signs of extraordinary activity.”

  The Germans had not made much of the uranium already in their possession. At a laboratory in Leipzig in 1942, Robert Dopel and Werner Heisenberg managed to construct a crude spherical fission device out of uranium and heavy water. But it started to leak, and when the physicists opened the outer shell for inspection, the uranium reacted with the air, caught on fire, and then burst in a harmless nonnuclear fizzle, spraying the whole lab with a mess of burning uranium that set the building ablaze. The Leipzig fire brigade offered the pair congratulations for the achievement in “atomic fission,” leaving the scientists in despair. This was one of the only known uses of St. Joachimsthal uranium during World War II and high-water mark of the Nazi nuclear effort.

  Shinkolobwe was a much bigger prize. Parts of its ore body demonstrated a freakishly high grade of 63 percent uranium. Moreover, it could be operated in the secrecy and obscurity of the African heartland, with a ready workforce close at hand and within the borders of a friendly colonial power. It is doubtful the Manhattan Project ever would have developed a bomb without Shinkolobwe. Even its garbage was a treasure. The geologist Phillip Merritt was sent out to the mine for a look in 1943, and he found ore in the waste piles that registered up to 20 percent pure uranium, far surpassing anything else that could be mined in the world. High-grade ore began to flow into the United States, some of it packed in burlap bags left over from a South American tin mine, each bag stamped with the legend PRODUCT OF BOLIVIA.

  Once the uranium was inside America, the fissile component had to be separated from the more stable part of the ore, and this would take a gigantic amount of electricity. One possible met
hod had been suggested by John Dunning and Eugene Booth at Columbia University, and it built upon the concept proposed by Otto Frisch in Britain: Mix the uranium with hexafluoride gas and pump it against a porous surface (a screen made of millions of tiny openings) that would capture the lightest part. If repeated thousands of times, this would create a “cascade” effect that would eventually yield enough U-235 to shape into a bomb.

  But uranium hexafluoride was incredibly corrosive, a gassy version of battery acid, and it would take thousands of high-quality separation tanks all working in succession to push it through the cascades and eke out even a few pounds of the necessary material. Such a pharaonic project would require an isolated patch of countryside that also happened to be near a source of cold water and a large electrical facility.

  The Manhattan Project condemned just such an area of fifty-nine thousand acres along Tennessee’s Black Oak Ridge near the Clinch River that happened to be nearby a brand-new TVA power plant and far away from prying eyes. Two small towns were evacuated and demolished; the region, now called the Clinton Engineer Works, was sealed off; and construction began on the gaseous diffusion plant. Dubbed K-25, the plant would employ twelve thousand people, who were housed in a muddy settlement called Oak Ridge, which was itself nicknamed “Dogpatch” after the hayseed town portrayed in the newspaper comic strip Li’l Abner.

  The diffusion plant was shaped like a large U. Each of its legs extended a half mile; technicians found it convenient to use bicycles to travel from one end to the other. It was, at the time, the largest building anywhere in the world. Another isotopic separation plant on the site, a racetrack-shape series of electromagnetic separators known as calutrons, went online early in 1945. It was located in a valley seven miles from the other plant, under the logic that if one should explode, the other would still be functional. The finished uranium-235 was stored in a hollowed-out bluff near a white farmhouse, the grain silo of which was actually a machine-gun nest.

  Most of the employees were never told that their jobs were connected to weapons. Those who knew of the presence of uranium were never supposed to call the stuff by its real name; official nonsense words—tuballoy and yttrium—were coined instead. Even senior managers had little idea of what was happening. This was a Groves hallmark: He was a compulsive hoarder of information, keeping most of his command chain divided into separate units forbidden to communicate with one another. “Every man should know everything he needs to know to do his job, and nothing else” was one of his maxims, and the culture of secrecy infected every corner of the Manhattan Project. The officer in charge of contracts with Union Minière became frustrated with the “cryptic conversations” he was forced to have with the Belgians and complained about the baffling conversations he was forced to interpret.

  Yet another facility was located on the grounds at Oak Ridge: a tomb-like structure of concrete nicknamed the “Black Barn” and officially called X-10. This was America’s first permanent nuclear reactor, which was designed to synthesize a newly discovered element called plutonium. A close cousin of uranium, and even more fissile, it had been isolated in 1941 by a team of researchers at the University of California led by the physics professor Glenn Seaborg, who had successfully bombarded uranium with neutrons to produce the first “transuranic” element; the same element that Enrico Fermi had tried to discover in Italy. Plutonium’s name was foreordained. It came from the planet Pluto, which had first been spotted from an Arizona observatory only eleven years prior. This was a nod to the long-ago German pharmacist Martin Klaproth, who had christened uranium for a distant member of the solar system.

  Plutonium does not occur in nature, except as a freak occurrence and in minute quantities. It is formed when uranium is bombarded with neutrons, thus creating an element that oxidizes in eerie pinkish-orange colors and has virtually no use except widespread destruction. It emits so many alpha rays that even a small chunk of it is warm to the touch. The Manhattan Project scientists were unsure if it would be as deadly as uranium in a bomb, but Enrico Fermi had already demonstrated a dependable way to manufacture it in bulk.

  Fermi had built and tested the world’s first nuclear reactor on an old squash court underneath Stagg Field at the University of Chicago in December 1942. The “pile,” as he called it, was a simple structure of uranium slugs encased with graphite bricks to slow down the neutrons. Size was the crucial factor: It had to be large enough to achieve critical mass but small enough to avoid flooding the South Side of Chicago with a wave of radiation. This required some ingenuity. Fermi’s team had designed rods made of cadmium (an element that absorbs neutrons) that could be lowered into the bricks to calm the eruption of the uranium atoms. The chain reaction could therefore be ignited and snuffed at will. A nuclear fission, once thought to be physical anarchy, turned out to be as easy to command as a propane flame on a barbecue grill.

  This would become the basic model for all nuclear power plants, and the X-10 at Tennessee was designed to replicate the feat. Except that the creation of plutonium, not energy, would be the true purpose.

  Groves decided to make an expensive bet on the new element and ordered the purchase of a sere and depopulated region of Washington State near the Columbia River. “Most of the area was sagebrush, suitable only for driving sheep to and from summer pasture in the mountains,” said Groves. A few families had lived there since their ancestors had come to the Northwest in horse-drawn wagons, and more than one kept a hearth fire that had first been lit in the prior century and kept aflame for sentimental reasons. When the army bought their homes, it was forced to scoop up and transport a few cheerily burning fires as well.

  The U.S. government would, in secret, turn this land into the Hanford Site: a reservation for the manufacture of plutonium that would soon become the most polluted piece of real estate on earth. It was half the size of Rhode Island and featured 3 nuclear reactors, 540 buildings, a wartime budget of $358 million, and more employees than it had taken to dig the Panama Canal four decades earlier. A rock chipped out of the ground by farmers living in near Stone Age conditions was fed into the most advanced industrial complex ever constructed, an endeavor the budget and employment figures of which were, according to the historian Richard Rhodes, on rough par with the entire automobile industry. Its only task was to process what little uranium the United States had managed to secure from three sources: Edgar Sengier’s Shinkolobwe, a radium mine at the edge of the Great Slave Lake in Canada, and the tailings from old mines in Colorado. There was none to spare.

  By the spring of 1945, Japan’s surrender was becoming increasingly certain, and it remained doubtful that the United States would be able to produce a usable atomic bomb by the end of the war. There were only thirty-three pounds of enriched uranium available, not nearly enough to achieve the target of 2.8 critical masses that a device would require. Leslie Groves pressured his DuPont contractors at Hanford to boost the plutonium output; his subordinates termed this “the super-acceleration program.” The majority of America’s stock of natural uranium had already been channeled into the reactors at Hanford, and this judgment would come as a costly embarrassment if the fuel should fail to materialize by the end of the war. An acquaintance of Groves’s joked that Groves ought to buy a house near Capitol Hill—so it would be an easy walk to Congress to answer for all his promiscuous spending.

  Then came a surprise.

  A little over a month before Adolf Hitler ate a last meal of spaghetti and shot himself in the temple in his bunker near Wilhelmstrasse in 1945, a submarine named Unterseeboot-234 sailed out of the harbor in Kiel, Germany, with a crew of sixty and some very curious cargo.

  The vessel was one of the biggest submarines in the German fleet, nearly three times as large as an average U-boat. It had left Germany in a twilight atmosphere: The Red Army was closing in on Berlin, and the Americans under General Dwight D. Eisenhower had already crossed the Moselle River into the heart of the disintegrating Reich. The submarine’s captain was Johann Fehler, a
lieutenant who had never before seen undersea combat. He was the best the German military could find in their ravaged ranks. Allied depth charges or torpedoes had already killed nearly three out of every four submariners. “It was clear to all of us that this war was lost, and nobody wanted to be a part of this mission,” said one of the crew.

  Its orders were to ship to Japan a load of sensitive military equipment, including proximity fuses, blueprints for the V-2 rocket, chemical weapons, and two complete jet fighters, which had been dismantled and their parts wrapped for the voyage. And tucked away in the box keel was the primary cargo: a series of ten wooden boxes stamped St 1270/1-10, JAPANESE ARMY, each holding metal cylinders lined with gold foil and containing powdered uranium oxide.

  There were 1,235 pounds of it in all, the remnants of Germany’s halfhearted attempt to build its own atomic bomb. The uranium had possibly come from the seizure of Union Minière’s yellow pyramids on the docks in Belgium, but more likely it was from the tailing dumps at St. Joachimsthal. It was now being shipped out in this eleventh-hour attempt to pass usable war matériel to Japan.

  The submarine was also carrying fourteen passengers, mostly high-ranking Nazi military officers who, in the face of certain defeat at home, had been ordered to aid Japan in her foundering struggle in the Pacific. Among them were the Luftwaffe general Ulrich Kessler, an expert in air defense, and Dr. Heinz Schlicke, a rocket scientist who was supposed to help Tokyo manufacture its own V-2 rockets. Two high-ranking members of the Japanese navy were also on board, Genzo Shoji and Hideo Tomonaga. It was not clear which of the passengers, if any, had been assigned to safeguard the uranium.

  Captain Fehler initially set a course that would take the sub to Southeast Asia by going around the tip of Africa and through the Melaka Straits. He avoided enemy destroyers by descending to a level of nine hundred feet and sneaking unscathed into the North Atlantic, even though British cryptographers were monitoring the submarine’s transmissions. But on May 4, the entire crew heard a special shortwave broadcast from Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had been appointed president of the shattered Reich after Hitler’s suicide. His only job was to surrender the remnants of the German war machine to the Allies, and he started with his own navy.