Those who wanted to do serious mining had to hire a bulldozer to come plow a road to their site. Any kind of dirt track would do, and the roads were an awful kind of art in themselves. They were blasted into cliff sides, routed through arroyos and up makeshift dug ways, and carved into precipitous slopes at terrifying gradients. “Some of the ecologists today would be very unhappy with me if they saw some of the roads we built,” laughed a former Atomic Energy Commission official in 1970. Several truckers lost their lives in spillovers. One unfortunate man on the remote White Rim Road was on his bulldozer when it tipped over and pinned his arm to the ground just after a supply truck left. Nobody would be back for another three days; the heat and thirst surely would have killed him had he not fished out his pocketknife and sawed off his own arm.
After a prospector had his road built, it was only a matter of getting at the fossilized trees. The strategy did not differ from the blast-and-tunnel methods perfected in Appalachian coal mines in the previous century. Hammers and dynamite were used to bore into the mesas. The debris was shoveled out by low-paid muckers—often local Navajo Indians—who loaded the rock into mine-track cars or wheelbarrows. The sandstone was usually sturdy enough to tolerate the passage of a mine tunnel, but the passages had to be braced with timbers. Miners bragged about their ability to “smell” the uranium inside the earth.
Charlie Steen did his part to fuel the boom by opening a hangar-size mill that at its peak employed nearly three hundred workers and sixty truckers who hauled in the ore from all points on the Colorado Plateau. Here the ore was pounded into gravel by a series of steel plates, roasted, and then mixed with sulfuric acid or sodium chlorate to leach out the uranium-containing portion. The resulting solution was run through an ion exchanger—a device like a conventional water softener—to remove the sickly residue of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake in the industry and as “baby shit” in the vernacular of mill employees. Most of them would moonlight to hunt for their own versions of Mi Vida in the ghostly red-rock desert, which featured more than five hundred working mines of varying sizes. And the immigrants kept coming.
“There were lots of camp trailers down by the river, and every sign in town had the words ‘atomic’ or ‘uranium’ shouting from the stencils,” recalled Tom McCourt. “But if you looked behind the facade, Moab was still wearing the overalls and straw hat of her agricultural Mormon founders. There were always farmers and cowboys in town, and beat-up old pickup trucks with hay bales and ugly dogs in the back.”
Charlie Steen bought the old Starbuck Motel building and turned it into workers’ quarters. And when that grew full, he started construction on a new subdivision of detached family homes named Steenville. He could afford it. Within two years, the Mi Vida mine and his Utex Exploration Company were worth $150 million. Never a particularly good businessman, Steen got into a tangle of lawsuits with former partners and people he accused of “claim jumping” plots of land near Mi Vida. But he was also ridiculously generous, donating money for schools, churches, and college scholarships, and to just about anybody who asked him. Recalled his wife, Minnie Lee, to an interviewer, “All they had to do was pat him on the back and tell him how great he was and say, ‘Can you let me have about fifty thousand dollars, Charlie?’ He loved them all.” Before long, Steen acquired the inevitable nickname “Good-Time Charlie.” On a family vacation to Spain, he rented out an entire carnival for the night so the poor children of the village where he had been staying could enjoy Ferris wheel rides and cotton candy.
“Maybe I’m crazy,” Steen told a reporter. “Maybe I should sell out and get out. But I don’t want to retire with a bundle. I like this life.” He was then just thirty-three years old.
The northern slope of the Cruel Mountains was in Germany, where the range was called by a different name: the Ore Mountains.
Mining had been the backbone of the economy here for eight hundred years. A local legend said that the first wagons to pass through here showed traces of lead on the wheels, which started a Dark Ages mining rush. The folds and valleys became dotted with plump little parish towns of cobblestone and steep roofs. Pits that had been first dug in the twelfth century yielded silver and tin and were named with the Bible and church history in mind: King David, White Dove, St. John. The mountains were also famous for the manufacture of lace cloth and the sale of nutcrackers that miners carved during the boring winter months. They were shaped like dolls and dressed to resemble German politicians.
The miners of the Ore Mountains considered themselves a tough and capable breed, even when they were unemployed, and hailed one another with the greeting “Glück auf,” a phrase that literally means “Luck up,” but is more akin to “Luck is coming to you,” or “Good luck on your way up.” Their swagger was irritating to some of their neighbors in Saxony, who called them “shaft shitters” for their supposed penchant for defecating underground.
Their silver was also mingled with uranium, considered an irritant up until the 1920s, when leading citizens of the town of Schlema sought to cash in on the craze for radium water and spa vacations. They sank twelve wells and built the grandiose Radiumbad Oberschlema Hotel to lure the moneyed set down from Berlin, a convenient four hours away by express train.
There were bathing pools and cafés and gambling halls; all the things that a Weimar-era holiday demanded. A photograph from 1939 shows dapper guests lying in reclining chairs, breathing through cone-shaped masks that hissed with radium steam. It was thought this was healthy for the lungs. Jews were pointedly barred after Hitler came to power, but the spa continued to do good business through World War II, so good even that approximately two thousand customers came to inhale radioactive steam even in the disastrous year of 1945, when most of Germany’s cities lay in bomb-cratered ruin.
The Red Army moved into Schlema shortly after the war, as it had into St. Joachimsthal, and the geologists were stunned at what they found: veins of pitchblende up to eleven yards wide. These were some of the richest deposits ever found outside of Africa. The Russians quickly formed a state mining company with a deceptive name: Wismut, which means “bismuth.” And for a director, Stalin picked a man who was already hated and feared.
General Mikhail Maltsev, the son of an electrician, had overseen a network of forced-labor camps and coal mines in the freezing Vorkuta district of Siberia during the 1930s. His ruthlessness against dissent was already legendary, as was his loyalty to the regime. Maltsev was now transferred to Germany and put in charge of supplying uranium for the world’s second all-out program to build an atomic bomb.
In his own way, Maltsev was as driven and as effective as Leslie Groves had been in kick-starting the Manhattan Project. His main obstacle was a lack of manpower, so he employed hiring tactics that were familiar to him from Siberia: slave labor. It was already being used across the mountains in St. Joachimsthal.
“We are Bolsheviks,” Maltsev told a meeting of party officials, “and there is no fortress we cannot storm.” Police were ordered to round up drunks in bars and vagrants in railroad stations. When that source ran dry, ordinary people—taxi drivers, schoolteachers, butchers, pharmacists, and waiters—were convicted of phony crimes and deported to the radium towns. One of the important early recruits was a mining director named Schmidt, an enthusiastic Nazi who had been detained in a prison camp after the war. Once the Soviet authorities realized he had impeccable knowledge of the tunnels, he was recalled to the uranium mines and told he would “pay with his life” if production was not boosted immediately. Schmidt hardly slept from then on, and spent all his waking hours on the job, cheerfully showing up in the middle of the night if he was called in for even a minor problem. The Russians rewarded him with a new apartment and a car, and he would go on to be as passionate a defender of Stalin as he had been of Hitler.
Maltsev organized his unskilled draftees into brigades of six men each. They were handed shovels and pneumatic drills and ordered into the tunnels first dug by merchant burghers in a distant century.
The tunnels were quickly widened, extended, and rail tracked by swarms of emaciated German refugees. The genteel Radiumbad Oberschlema Hotel was razed after uranium was discovered underneath, a fate that eventually befell almost the entirety of downtown. Heaps of waste rocks were pyramided where the houses used to be; the surrounding hills came to resemble a volcanic desert.
Those too sick to work underground were handed Geiger counters and told to comb the birch and pine forests for any sign of radioactivity. The hills quickly became scarred with dog-hole excavations. Otherwise valuable minerals such as cobalt and bismuth were treated as nuisances and abandoned; exploiting them for their own sake was considered too time-consuming. Uranium had become the only pursuit. “Ask for what you like,” Stalin had told his nuclear scientists. “You won’t be refused.” What they needed most of all was uranium, and meeting the preassigned quotas was now a matter of life or death for those who had been sentenced to work at Wismut. The company slogan, “Uranium Every Hour,” was now alpha and omega, mantra and meaning.
Maltsev drove his prisoners hard. The powerful rat-tat-tat of the pneumatic drills—known in miners’ patois as shooting tools—wrecked the nerves and sinews of men not accustomed to hard industrial labor. The heat and claustrophobia of the mine shafts were overpowering for some. In the shafts heated by natural radium water, the temperatures were known to reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit, even in winter. Most men assigned to work in the deep adits stripped down to their undershorts to keep from passing out. A former barber named Heinz Pickert, who had served on a U-boat during the war, worked himself so hard that his hands grew numb and began to shake at all hours of the day. He tried to go back to work at a barber for Wismut, but he had to quit because his jittering hands could no longer hold a pair of scissors.
The rail lines leading out of the mountains had been damaged by Allied bombs, and so the first good chunks of pitchblende had to be loaded into the trunks of cars and driven to an air base in Dresden, where they were flown into Russia. On Joseph Stalin’s sixty-ninth birthday, some officers tied a large red bow around a large piece of pitchblende as a “present” for the general secretary.
American intelligence agencies had only a hazy idea of what was happening. A network of enrichment plants had been built in Siberia, but their locations were hard to pinpoint. The emergence of new uranium mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains was overlooked by Western intelligence agencies, still operating under Leslie Groves’s assumption that uranium was a rare resource. A U.S. intelligence report from 1946 estimated that the Soviet Union itself would produce no more than two hundred tons per year over the course of the next four years, a badly flawed estimate. The U.S. consulate in West Berlin offered cash rewards for any defector from the uranium mines who could bring in a few lumps of the ore so the purity of the enemy’s reserves could be analyzed.
When news of this reached Maltsev, tougher security procedures were put in place. The miners already had to show their identification cards before entering the shafts and were forbidden to use the word uranium in private conversation (the correct term was ore or metal). They were now searched for smuggled radioactive material at shift change; guards were assigned to pass the wand of a Geiger counter over their bodies. Suspicion fell on all ranks. Russian supervisors were usually rotated back to Moscow after only a short tour of duty in the uranium zone, to reduce the chances of their making friendly contact with the West. Suspicion of espionage meant death. Miners, too, were punished with a firing squad for sedition.
Certain that Russian uranium reserves were scarce, America was caught off guard by the August 29, 1949, test of the first Soviet atomic bomb, nicknamed “Joe-1.” More than 50 percent of the uranium for that weapon was believed to have come from Wismut. The CIA’s forecast of Soviet nuclear potency was off by four years; the embarrassed head of the scientific division termed it “an almost total failure.” But the agency was more successful in discovering an enrichment plant near the city of Tomsk after a science officer named John R. Craig was given a furry hat worn by a German-speaking defector who had lived in the area. The hat revealed traces of U-235 in its fur: The uranium was literally floating in the air outside the poorly contained facility. Another informant also helped identify a plant near the tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railroad that bore a misleading sign outside that read STALIN MOTOR WORKS.
Rumors of Wismut’s true purpose had been spreading all over the Soviet-controlled zones. The worst stories were fiction, but the place still inspired dread. A West German named Werner Knop acquired forged traveling papers and spent a week at the edge of the mining zone, in the grim city of Chemnitz, called the Gate of Tears by the trainloads of workers who passed through there on the way to the mines, about to suffer what they believed to be displaced Russian vengeance for Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union.
“The uranium miners work up to twelve hours a day, urged on by Soviet convict soldiers, who act as overseers, and who are themselves punished draconically if their charges fail to meet the daily norms,” wrote Knop in a 1949 book entitled Prowling Russia’s Forbidden Zone: A Secret Journey into Soviet Germany. “There is no mechanical help, no ventilation, and the most elementary safety devices and health precautions are lacking. The miners work knee-deep in water and are exposed to radioactivity. To this come the ravages of syphilis spread through the brothels established by the Russians for both troops and miners and supplied with the dregs of the big cities of the zone.”
Knop’s account suffered from exaggeration, but his report of sexual license at Wismut was on target. Women recruited or sentenced to the camps—there were as many as twenty thousand of these “ore angels,” as they were known—were treated as playthings by their Soviet overseers and German coworkers. Some prostituted simply to eat. More than half of the workforce suffered from syphilis and gonorrhea.
Knop was also right about the sorry state of repair in the mines. The poor equipment was the direct cause of multiple accidents, including a particularly gruesome incident in April 1947 when an elevator cable broke in mine number 3 and sent eight men plunging to their deaths four hundred feet below. An internal report that year was blunt: “The conditions of work are pictured in such a way that one might believe these are reports from a penal colony. On the surface or underground, the people stand knee-deep in slime, without rubber boots or water boots.” Malnutrition was also a factor, as the managers slashed food rations when quotas were not met.
Another report revealed that 1,281 miners had been killed in accidents, and approximately 20,000 had suffered injuries or unspecified damage to their health during a six-month period. To put that figure in perspective, this happened near the peak of Wismut’s production, at the height of the Soviet crash atomic program. There were nearly 150,000 laborers in the uranium fields, a number that equals the present-day population of Salem, Oregon. If the company’s own figures are to be believed, nearly one out of every seven people wound up dead, sick, or hurt.
Collapses and fires were the most common hazards in the web of tunnels that had been dug and secured by novice engineers. The stone ceilings were known to buckle and cave in if they were not securely braced with logs or metal beams. The Russians often blamed mine accidents on “sabotage” and used them as excuses to weed the ranks of workers they did not trust.
A sign hanging in one of the shafts instructed miners to tap out messages to their rescuers if they became trapped behind a rockfall:
1x = i Am ALL RIGHT. 2x = AIR IS Running Out. 3x = my CONDITION IS BAD. 4x = EXTRAORDINARY MEASURES ARE NECESSARY.
One of the deadliest fires broke out under Schlema on the night of July 15, 1955. A worker named Wolfgang Abenroth at the end of a cul-de-sac tunnel did not hear the alarm and was wondering why the pit boss was late for his usual visit. But when Abenroth and his crew smelled smoke, they knew they were in trouble. They stacked up logs and waste rock to build an improvised firewall and sat down to wait for rescue.
“The fear was as big as anything we felt
during the war,” Abenroth recalled later. “Being walled in for good was always going through my head.” Rescuers took more than two days to reach him and his friends. When they emerged into sunlight, they learned that thirty-three of their comrades had been killed. The cause was a frayed ventilator wire in a shaft, but the managers announced it had been an “act of sabotage” and sent in a special detachment of police to investigate.
Abenroth felt guilty for surviving and never forgot the claustrophobia of those two days. “There is a feeling of luck and sadness that will always accompany me like a shadow,” he told a newspaper reporter forty years later.
This was an uncharacteristic display of emotion for a miner. The Wismut men were supposed to maintain their composure in the face of danger. To show fright was to risk a beating from the overseer, as well as the contempt of the rest of their brigade. Sangfroid was a prized attribute.
“It was the same thing for the sailors who went into the Bermuda Triangle,” said a pit boss named Rudolf Dietel years later. “They knew about the danger, but they sailed in there anyhow. If you let yourself get scared, you weren’t much of a miner.”
He remembered going to the miners’ union beer hall for a funeral wake for a man who had been crushed to death in a subterranean accident. His widow was in a corner booth, crying and inconsolable. “Why did my husband have to work there?” she asked.
Tom Zoellner Page 19