Tom Zoellner

by Uranium - Rock That Shaped the World

  The apocalyptic fears of postwar America never completely disappeared. When he accepted the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, the Mississippi novelist William Faulkner could declare with authority, “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?” The specter of death had become just another part of urban living, said Time magazine, noting that the modern man on the sidewalk now kept watch for “the blinding flash of a terrible light, brighter than a hundred suns.” The essayist E. B. White beheld a grim epiphany about his beloved New York City, and a modern reader might see shadows of September 11, 2001, in his thoughts: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. . . . In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.”

  The civil defense programs of the 1950s tried to soften this image with a comforting new story: An atomic war did not have to mean instant death. With the right precautions, said the experts, it could be survivable. A paperback guide called How to Survive an Atomic Attack, written by a Pentagon consultant, advised citizens to wear long pants, a hat, and—if possible—rubber boots to protect against fallout.

  “Just keep the facts in mind and forget the fairy stories,” it advised. “Follow the safety rules. Avoid panic. And you’ll come through alright.”

  The cellars of thousands of schools and libraries and suburban malls were classified as fallout shelters. Metal signs colored yellow and black were bolted up on exterior walls to mark their presence. Stocks of food products, many of which grew moldy, were stored inside. President Eisenhower ensured that the interstate highway system received generous funding: It was envisioned as a national web of blacktop to evacuate cities in case of attack. The highways emanating from city cores quickly became the spines of new suburbs, where many said they felt safer from crime and possible nuclear attack. At the U.S. General Services Administration, Tracy Augur concluded that the traditional city was obsolete and “not only fails to offer any security against enemy attack; it actually invites it, and places the lives and property of the citizens in jeopardy.” He also noted that some cities “seem to feel as if they don’t rate unless they contain at least one good A-bomb target.” A suburban advocate named Peter J. Cunningham wrote to the Chicago Daily Tribune: “Leading scientists declare that the secret of the atomic bomb cannot be controlled; therefore it behooves us to spread out over the countryside so that such bombs may fall without killing so many people at a time, or causing so much damage.” The editors headlined his letter PREPARING FOR ARMAGEDDON.

  This thinking was endorsed at top levels. President John F. Kennedy was an enthusiastic proponent of fallout shelters and had one built at the family compound in Palm Beach, Florida. The White House authorized the hollowing of a basalt mountain in the horse country near Mount Weather, Virginia, to house a replacement government in case Washington, D.C., should be lost. The command center is said to contain a cafeteria, a hospital, bunk rooms, a crematorium for the disposal of dead members of the executive branch, and a television studio for postbellum broadcasts. (The facility still gets used; by some accounts, this was the “undisclosed location” where Vice President Dick Cheney was relocated after the September 11 attacks.) Congress retaliated by building its own secret bunker underneath the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, in the name of “continuity of government.”

  Those not lucky enough to hold elective office were encouraged by the Office of Civil Defense and Mobilization to build their own fallout shelters and stock them with food, blankets, flashlights, and Geiger counters. Approximately one million families heeded the call and constructed subterranean refuges that ranged from a shovel-dug hole in the backyard covered with cardboard to plush accommodations that cost as much as a new house and doubled as a rumpus room.

  American children were the target audience for instructional books such as Walt Disney’s Our Friend the Atom, which deployed the most fundamental of nuclear clichés: a genie released from his bottle who has the power to kill his master. “We have the scientific knowledge to turn the genie’s might to peaceful and useful channels,” concluded the introduction. At the same time, children were taught to watch for any sign of a white flash and were subject to classroom drills in which everybody from the principal on down was supposed to hide underneath his or her desk. A cartoon instructional film, produced by New York’s Archer Films and sponsored by the U.S. government, featured a turtle whose shell protected him from radiation, just as a desk was supposed to shield a child. The signature jingle was widely ridiculed.

  There was a turtle by the name of Bert

  And Bert the Turtle was always alert

  When danger threatened him he never got hurt

  He knew just what to do

  Duck and Cover

  The Atomic Energy Commission also tried its best to put a friendlier face on uranium by emphasizing its peaceful uses. “We were grimly determined to prove that this discovery was not just a weapon,” said David Lilienthal. This was despite the growing consensus among scientists that the “miracles” of atomic energy were nothing more than outright fairy tales. The director of research for General Electric reported that “loud guffaws” could be heard in the laboratory whenever somebody repeated a Laurentine promise of a future without disease, toil, or famine. “The economics of atomic power are not attractive at present, nor are they likely to be for a long time in the future,” he said. “This is expensive power, not cheap power, as the public has been led to believe.”

  But could the weapons themselves be used for something other than apocalypse? Testing at the Nevada Proving Ground had revealed that a nuclear bomb buried in a deep shaft underneath a mountain would vaporize the surrounding rock and make a huge cathedral-like space inside the earth, ablaze with radioactivity. But the only noticeable effect aboveground was that the mountain bucked approximately six inches at the moment of the blast. This led to speculation on the part of scientists at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory in California: Why think of the uranium chain reaction as just a tool for flattening enemy cities? Why not bury one inside a rocky shoreline and use it to instantly carve out a harbor? Or tear a canal across Israel that would rival the Suez? Or perhaps set one off underground in a region of oil sands to release trapped petroleum reserves?

  This was the mentality behind the Plowshare program, an ill-fated AEC initiative that explored the use of nuclear bombs as construction tools. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad went so far as to consult with the state of California about blasting a two-mile channel through the Bristol Mountains for a speedier route from Flagstaff, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Plowshares did a feasibility study on setting off a string of hundreds of bombs simultaneously to widen the Panama Canal. Helpfully included in the study was a map of the likely patterns of radioactive fallout that would blanket large portions of Central America.

  Commissioner Willard Libby insisted that it would be unnatural not to use nuclear weapons in such a fashion. “There is a natural law, I think, which requires us not to turn our backs on nature,” he told a congressional committee. (By “nature,” he meant nuclear weapons.)

  The program was inaugurated with Project Gnome, a scheme to detonate a small device, with approximately one-seventh of the yield of the Hiroshima bomb, inside a siltstone aquifer under a piece of barren scrubland outside Carlsbad, New Mexico. The idea was to instantly boil the groundwater into steam to see if power generation might be feasible.

  Reporters and scientists were invited to watch—actually, listen—from a reviewing stand on December 10, 1961. There was a muffled bang, and the ground heaved and punched upward, cracking a wellhead. Almost immediately, radioactive steam and black smoke began pouring out. “The blast burst through a cavern shaft, ignited a chemical charge prematurely, and jolted observers five miles away,” not
ed one correspondent. It also kicked up a giant cloud of radioactive dust that drifted across a nearby highway. When workers tunneled in more than half a year later to inspect the damage, they found a hollow chamber about the size of the U.S. Capitol dome. The rock walls were colored brilliant shades of blue, green, and purple and bore an angry surface temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Drilling at the site is prohibited today; the radiation still poses a danger. The Plowshare program went on to detonate two dozen more warheads, mostly underneath the Nevada Test Site, before finally being discredited.

  The Gnome blast was firmly in the spirit of a larger U.S. government initiative to make the best of the reality that it had inherited. The centerpiece was a magnanimous attempt to share nuclear technology so that countries such as Pakistan, India, and the Belgian Congo could maintain their own reactors and be partners in the revolution foreseen by William L. Laurence. The dream of atomic power had been slow to take root (the United States finally achieved critical mass in an experimental station in Idaho a full six years after Hiroshima; commercial use was still a decade away), but President Dwight Eisenhower took an active interest and was convinced that it ought to be shared with all friendly countries. They would get it anyway, he reasoned. Why not sow goodwill by simply giving it to them first? He foresaw “an atomic Marshall Plan” for the world in which the United States would donate about 44,000 pounds of U-235 for distribution to qualified nations. This was, ideally, to be the start of a global uranium bank.

  “It is not enough to take this weapon out of the hands of the soldiers,” said Eisenhower in a landmark speech before the UN in 1954. “It must be put into the hands of those who will know how to strip its military casing and adapt it to the arts of peace.”

  This was the beginning of the controversial Atoms for Peace program, which planted reactors in such unlikely locations as Bangladesh, Algeria, Colombia, Jamaica, Ghana, Peru, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, and the Belgian Congo, earning millions for Western power contractors. Eisenhower’s program also led to the founding of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a thin ghost of the supercouncil first proposed by Bernard Baruch. The agency was supposed to promote the peaceful spread of uranium fission across the globe, with no mandate or funding to challenge nations that had other ideas. Opponents of the plan called it “Kilowatts for Hottentots,” after the perjorative name for an African tribe, and complained that such sensitive equipment ought not to be spread so promiscuously.

  But uranium cannot undergo fission in a reactor without producing a tiny residue of plutonium. This is an immutable law of physics. A “peaceful” nuclear reactor is no different in basic design from the complex at Hanford that manufactured the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. And herein lies one of the damnable paradoxes of uranium: The apparatus that spins a turbine also happens to be a munitions plant. One is a coefficient of the other; the mineral cannot escape its own unstable essence. “Mutually assured destruction” had been formulated with the Soviets in mind. Now here was a new idea: that somewhere, somehow, an unexpected actor with the means, the intellect, and the willpower could spirit away enough uranium to acquire the most formidable instrument in the world.

  In fact, it was already happening.

  “There’s uranium in the desert. . . .”

  The dreamy utterance floated like a prophecy across the dining room table in a New York City apartment in the fall of 1947.

  The speaker was Ernst David Bergmann, a professor of chemistry who had been invited over for a supper of scrambled eggs by his friend Abraham Feinberg after the two had attended a Friday-night synagogue service together.

  Feinberg was not happy to hear this prophecy spoken out loud in his dining room. He was then at the beginning of a career in the hosiery business; he headed the successful Hamilton Mills company and would one day acquire prestige clothing brands such as Catalina swim-wear and Fruit of the Loom underwear. A lover of squash and cigars, he was also an outspoken advocate and fund-raiser for the rights of Jews to permanently settle in Palestine. Among his friends he counted President Harry S. Truman and also the farmer and journalist David Ben-Gurion, who would soon become the first prime minister of the newborn state of Israel. Feinberg was a cultured and discreet man, a graduate of law school who never practiced law, and he didn’t want to hear this loose talk about uranium. It seemed rash. He told Bergmann to keep his mouth shut about it.

  But Bergmann was no dreamer. He knew exactly what he was talking about. For the last twelve years, he had been quietly studying ways to build up a technological edge for the Jewish paramilitary groups in Palestine who had been agitating against the British for an independent state. Bergmann’s position was not clandestine, but he was well placed as the scientific director of the Daniel Sieff Research Institute near Tel Aviv. He had trained many of the scientists who would make seminal contributions to the new Israeli military, including advances in rocketry, firearms, and surveillance equipment. Along with Feinberg, he enjoyed a personal friendship with Ben-Gurion. Yet the uranium in the desert was a topic too sensitive to be discussed in the open.

  The “desert” Bergmann was talking about exploring was the Negev, a picturesque expanse of sandstone cliffs, dry riverbeds, and basalt mountains in the southern quarter of Palestine, a depopulated region that would soon be absorbed into the new state of Israel. The “uranium” referred to the ore in some of the northern Negev’s phosphate deposits that Israel would soon be mining and using to stoke a secret reactor. The Israelis would eventually use the resulting plutonium to build up an arsenal whose total has been estimated at between two hundred and four hundred warheads. The number remains classified today, as does the very existence of the program.

  Israel’s journey toward nuclear armament was one that involved high-level deception, overseas financing, careful diplomacy, and, at one point, an elaborate charade of sea piracy on the Mediterranean, but it began with the most basic question of atomic potency for any nation: Where do you find the uranium?

  In the case of Israel, it was virtually lying in the backyard. Uranium in the land of the Bible was on the minds of the leadership before Israel had even won its war of independence against a coalition of Arab foes in 1948. When the Negev was still largely controlled by the Egyptian army, a group of scientists was sent to locate and assess the deposits Bergmann had described. The head of the exploration team was a thirty-year-old chemist turned solider who confirmed that the Oren Valley indeed had a small source of low-grade uranium.

  His team had been acting on a well-sourced tip. A Jewish paramilitary group called the Haganah—the forerunner of today’s Israel Defense Forces—had learned that a British mining company had discovered some mysterious “black rocks” near a source of crude oil and phosphates. Bergmann figured he could extract at least five tons of uranium from the Negev each year and feed it directly into a heavy-water reactor.

  This was exactly what David Ben-Gurion wanted to hear. The idea of an Israeli nuclear program enchanted him from the start of his tenure as prime minister in 1948. The new but small Mediterranean state was boxed in by a ring of hostile Arab nations that would need to win only a single decisive military victory to eliminate it. The Holocaust had proved that anti-Semitism could lead to death on an industrial scale, and Ben-Gurion felt that Israel had to possess the ultimate tool of defense—if not immediately, then at some point in the future. The state would have to become a coastal fortress with an awesome weapon of final resort. Though he was not a particularly religious man, there was a touch of the sacred in the way Ben-Gurion viewed atomic weapons. “This could be the last thing that could save us,” he said once in a speech, referring vaguely to “science,” but knowledgeable listeners heard the intellectual rumblings of what would become Israel’s own Manhattan Project.

  Ben-Gurion was also an enthusiastic promoter of the Negev, where he made his home, the same place where Abraham and Jacob were said to have tended flocks of sheep. In 587 B.C., the prophet Ezekiel had been commanded to go to the Negev and
say on God’s behalf: “Behold, I am about to kindle a fire in you, and it will consume every green tree in you, as well as every dry tree; the blazing flame will not be quenched and the whole surface from south to north will be burned by it. All flesh will see that I, the Lord, have kindled it; it shall not be quenched.” An atomic reactor could “make the desert bloom,” Ben-Gurion told weekend visitors, by desalinating water for agricultural use. And so much the better if the uranium could be drawn from the Negev, too. Development was initiated under the cover of a fertilizer company innocuously called Negev Phosphates Chemicals Co., and three small plants were built to separate the small bits of uranium out from the grayish sand.

  Israel’s real break came in 1957, when France found itself mired in a diplomatic crisis with Egypt over the Suez Canal and, in need of a regional ally, secretly agreed to provide technical and construction assistance for a reactor in the Negev south of the town of Dimona. Concrete footings were poured the following year, and false stories were spread that the Israeli government was building a “textile plant” or, alternatively, a “metallurgical lab.” Most of what was built was built underground, in an attempt to hide its true nature from airplanes and spy satellites. Groves of palm and other trees were strategically planted around the facility to obscure the view of the containment dome. The twenty-five hundred workers on the site received their mail via South America from a phony post office. France also offered a prime supply of U3 O8, otherwise known as yellowcake, the sickly colored powdered form in which uranium is typically barreled and transported. Ernst Bergmann supervised the reactor program from his post as chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, a body the stated purpose of which was peaceful research, but the real job of which was tending the subterranean facility at Dimona, where the heavy-water reactor first went critical in 1963. It was large enough to manufacture about fifteen pounds of plutonium per year, enough to build at least four bombs annually.