EPILOGUE
In the rush to put old fields back into production, one place did not escape notice.
A company called Brinkley Mining signed an agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2007 for the exploration and exploitation of five known deposits. A priority target was the pit at Shinkolobwe, where the supply of uranium seemed to be bottomless.
“The uranium potential of the areas selected is excellent,” said the chairman, Gerard Holden, in a statement, “and the Shinkolobwe mine represents a great opportunity for Brinkley Mining to redevelop and rehabilitate what was one of the world’s most prolific uranium oxide producers.”
As a bonus to the Congo—and perhaps a sign of eagerness—Brinkley also pledged to help fix the ramshackle nuclear reactor in Kinshasa and to install radiation detectors to keep Shinkolobwe’s stolen uranium from leaving the country.
The deal was quickly put in jeopardy by what seemed to be yet another application of the infamous Article Fifteen. Police in the Congo arrested two of Kinshasa’s top nuclear officials and accused them of conspiring in a criminal plot to illegally export the country’s uranium. The pair was released from jail within the week, though kept under investigation. A deputy mining minister then called the leases invalid. “Uranium is a reserved mineral,” he told a reporter. “We want to leave it for future generations.”
More than a thousand miles away, local authorities had decided to use the historic pit as a dump for radioactive waste. Some trace amounts of uranium had been found in a load of copper ore belonging to a Chinese company, and the government had ordered the ore to be poured into the open cut that had birthed the Hiroshima bomb. This seemed as good a place as any. But the truck driver apparently found a muddy road impassable, became frustrated, and sought a quick solution. He upended seventeen tons of the radioactive ore into the Likasi River, the source of drinking and bathing water for a nearby city.
The mystery of the illicit buying, meanwhile, was never solved. There was no accounting of how many bags of uranium might have left Shinkolobwe under a truck tarp and been smuggled through Zambia to places unknown. A few Western diplomats suggested that purchasing agents for Iran may have been the ultimate buyers. They could also have been elements of the A. Q. Khan sales network, or terrorists looking for shrapnel for a dirty bomb.
A more banal possibility, and one more likely than any of these others, is that the uranium was simply hoarded by a speculator waiting for a buyer to come forward, much as Edgar Sengier kept his own barrels from Shinkolobwe in a vegetable oil plant on Staten Island in 1940, patiently waiting for a visit from the U.S. Army.
The uranium could not be fashioned into a weapon by itself, but it might be useful to a state with nuclear ambitions. The purloined ore could be fed into a graphite-moderated heavy-water reactor, such as those now located at Khushab in Pakistan or Arak in Iran or even Cirrus in India, which can run on natural uranium. Though this would be a cheaper path to a bomb than conventional enrichment, such a scheme would require a campus that would be hard to conceal from spy satellites. At a minimum, there would have to be a yellowcake mill, a fuel fabrication plant, a reactor, and a sophisticated reprocessing shop with glove boxes, precision gear, and tubs of nitric acid. The Israelis built their bomb in the 1960s using just this method, but they had to hire a French contractor and bury their equipment six stories deep. The supply of raw uranium ore would have to exceed six tons at a minimum.
A nation that attempted such a cut-rate Manhattan Project would face formidable barriers. It would need millions of dollars and the unpredictable factor of luck. But seventy years of history has shown that nations are willing to make extraordinary sacrifices and challenge long odds to enter the club of the privileged. Ten nations have made the journey thus far. Pakistan’s Z. A. Bhutto had once promised his countrymen would “eat grass” for the sake of atomic potency, and the furtive ingenuity of A. Q. Khan matched the sense of that determination, if not the colorful actuality. The Soviet Union turned entire mountain ranges into gulags for the sake of pulling even with America in the arms race; America itself made a massive wager on an uncertain hypothesis in a time of war, and later sent at least six hundred—probably thousands—to cancerous death for the sake of a commanding nuclear edge. Israel, South Africa, India, and North Korea have all followed in their own pursuit of the uranium totem, spending huge amounts of capital and risking war. Iran may be next. The first century of our experience is not yet over. History is long.
If a speculator did take a flier in black-market uranium from Shinkolobwe, it would not be difficult to hide it from prying eyes. It could be barreled and stacked in an obscure corner of an industrial yard. It could be stored in a row of tin sheds in a forest. For that matter, it could simply be piled out in the open air, with the perfect disguise as a gravel heap. Rain or snow will not harm it. And its fissile potency will not substantially diminish until approximately seven hundred million years have passed.
There is much that remains enigmatic about uranium seventy years after Hiroshima. Even a basic question—“How much of it does the U.S. government have under lock and key?”—does not have a firm answer.
The U.S. Department of Energy decided in 1996 to make a complete inventory of all the highly enriched uranium America had manufactured through the years of the cold war. Such a task may have seemed easy at first glance: The enrichment had taken place under heavy security and with strict accounting procedures. But it turned out that centralized records did not exist. The policy of “atomic secrecy” had created pockets of information exclusive to different divisions within the AEC and the Strategic Air Command and the U.S. Navy and several other civilian and military entities. Nobody ever had access to the total picture. A fragmentary portrait had to be assembled from logbooks and typed memoranda from each division in the uranium empire—Paducah, Oak Ridge, Hanford, Savannah River, Rocky Flats—which began with the acquisition of the first barrels from Shinkolobwe.
The final report was suppressed for nearly a decade. The Federation of American Scientists waged a lengthy campaign to secure its release, and when it was finally declassified, it revealed that we had produced slightly more than 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium in the course of half a century, and that approximately 3.2 tons of it had vanished at some point.
The report’s authors were careful not to blame the “inventory difference” on theft, explaining that measuring equipment was considered imprecise before the early 1970s and tiny differences between the book inventory and the actual product may have mounted over time. There was also what engineers call holdup—fragments of uranium gas that cling to ducts and pipes and that can throw off the balance sheet. But there could be no definitive explanation for the loss.
The disparity was even greater on the other side of the cold-war divide. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, American researchers were surprised to learn that the Kremlin had no idea how much of the material it had produced during its four-decade buildup. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security and a former weapons inspector himself, put the total Russian stockpile at anywhere between 735 and 1,365 tons. This estimate was made during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency a decade ago, the last time that anything resembling transparency existed in Russia. The gap of more than 600 tons represented a supply of uranium as heavy as an ocean frigate and enough to make more than eight thousand nuclear weapons of the size and type that leveled Hiroshima. American investigators do not know how much of it still exists, or where it might be stored.
“We’re not sure even they understand how much they have,” Albright said of the Russians. Their inexactitude, he said, was due to poor record keeping over the decades.
His thoughts were echoed by Laura Holgate of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington, D.C.-based organization dedicated to warning governments and the public about the dangers of loose nuclear goods. An accurate tally of the amount of highly enriched uranium produced by Russia is impossible,
thanks to poor accounting and a culture of petty misinformation during the days of Communism. Rigorous quotas had encouraged plant managers to hoard a little uranium in case of a seasonal slowdown and to avoid criticism from their superiors in Moscow. The official logbooks were routinely falsified, and the production estimates therefore have a huge margin of error.
“There truly is no knowing how much really exists,” she said.
Holgate is a pleasant woman in her thirties with librarian’s glasses and an easy laugh. She told me one of the most frightening moments of her career was being taken inside a vault at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Inside were rows of multiple shelves—like a library—and resting in metal cradles on these shelves were the secondaries for hydrogen bombs. These were the charges, coated with raw uranium and cored with enriched uranium, that could provide an explosion of 50 million degrees Fahrenheit to force hydrogen nuclei to fuse together, creating a fireball hotter than the interior of the sun. To Holgate, the shelves seemed to go on and on.
The uranium archipelago that France operates on the African continent used to include several mines in its former colony of Gabon, a nation about the size of Colorado at the edge of the South Atlantic. The uranium deposits are deep in the interior, and one of the more productive mines was at a spot near the equator called Oklo.
A chemist in France examined some samples from the mine in 1972 and noticed that the proportion of U-235 was slightly lower than the usual concentration of 0.7 percent. This figure was previously thought to be constant, a rate set by the unchanging half-life of the uranium atom, and so the findings were highly unusual. The company informed the French Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, which started its own probe into the matter. The conclusions were startling.
The soil at Oklo had been a natural nuclear reactor. Approximately two billion years ago, the proportion of U-235 on the earth had been as high as 3 percent. The deposits at Oklo were sandwiched between layers of sandstone and granite and tilted in such a way that water could flow through the cracks and create pockets of highly concentrated ore. The water also acted as a moderator, slowing down the flying neutrons just enough to make them hit the uranium nuclei and create an underground chain reaction. The heat made the water turn to steam, which calmed the reaction, and when the water condensed again, the reaction restarted. This may have gone on for a million years before the uranium depleted, and accounted for the low number of U-235 atoms in the sample sent to France. The atoms had simply been destroyed two billion years ago in the Precambrian era.
At roughly the same time this was happening, simple bacteria in the oceans had begun to respire, using oxygen to convert food into energy for the first time.
“After the reactor had shut down, the evidence of its activity was preserved virtually undisturbed through the succeeding ages of geological activity,” wrote George Cowan, a former Manhattan Project scientist who visited the site.
He concluded: “In the design of fission reactors, man was not an innovator, but an unwitting imitator of nature.”
The vegetable oil warehouse that sheltered Edgar Sengier’s barrels was demolished years ago, but the lot where it stood can still be found on the shores of Staten Island. The property is located in a scruffy waterfront neighborhood at the southern footing of the Bayonne Bridge, dotted with derelict lots and auto supply companies. This had once been a busy part of New York Harbor before the rise of large container ships had consigned it to obscurity.
I had been given the address and went to see it one night. There was a light fog, muting the lights on the span of the crescent-shaped bridge. Slightly to the east was a vacant yard, a postindustrial gloaming empty of everything but scrap metal, a few parked vehicles, and a stack of concrete road barriers. There was a fence topped with barbed wire, and some roadside bushes almost concealed a placard: PROTECTED by SUPREME SECURITY SERVICES: TOTAL SECURITY FOR An INSECURE WORLD. 877-877-7899. Another sign warned of a guard dog.
The northern edge of the property fronts a tidal strait called the Kill Van Kull, which separates Staten Island from Bayonne, New Jersey. Most of the remnants of the World Trade Center had been towed by barge through this channel in the autumn of 2001, on their way to permanent disposal in a nearby landfill. The debris had passed only a few yards from the spot where the material for the first atomic bomb had lain in waiting sixty years before.
I stood at the edge of the lot and tried to imagine what the place might have looked like when the barrels full of yellow African soil had been unloaded from their freighters and rolled into the warehouse. North America was only the second continent it would touch. The uranium was in for two years of stillness, a brief sleep, before it would be trucked south for enrichment and then dropped over an Asian city, changing the world as it fell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hundreds of people were generous with their time and expertise in the research and reporting of this book. Thanks in particular to Nadezda Kavalirova of the Confederation of Political Prisoners in Prague, Jiri Pihera of the Tüv Cert mining company in St. Joachimsthal, Herman Meinel of the Museum Uranbergau in Schlema, Amanda Buckley of Rio Tinto in Darwin, Steve Kidd of the World Nuclear Association in London, and Moussa Abdoulaye of Areva in Niamey. Jennifer Steil of the Yemen Observer was a gracious host in Sana’a, and I am extremely grateful for her referrals and suggestions. Irina Lashkhi of the Open Society Institute pried open some government doors in Tbilisi.
Dr. Sung Kyu Kim of Macalester College and Dr. Keith Olive of the University of Minnesota helped me understand some points of atomic physics. Robert Alvarez offered some good advice. Mark Steen spent many hours on the telephone with me, telling stories about his famous father and offering wisdom about the current state of the uranium business. Vilma Hunt and Robert S. Norris—first-class uraniumophiles, both—provided inspiration and encouragement. Namposya Nampanya-Serpell supplied the Bemba definition of the word Shinkolobwe. David Schairer passed along the curious history of the Maria Theresa thaler.
David Smith of the New York Public Library is a magician among librarians, who can pull obscurities from that mammoth collection better than anybody I know. Walt and Sandy Lombardo, who hosted a reading for me in their Las Vegas bookstore in the summer of 2006, have been good friends, as well as a valuable source of geologic knowledge. Rainer Karlsch, an expert on Wismut history, offered advice in Berlin.
I am also thankful to Greg Cullison, Danielle Dahlstrom, Laura Babcock, Pamela Carr, Luke Newton, Alexia Brue, Nadine Rubin, Meeghan Truelove, Russ Baker, Andrew Bast, Nina Nowak, Sugi Ganeshananthan, Tom Vanderbilt, Alexis Washam, Michael Hawkins, Lionel Martin, Tungalag Flora, Sambalaibat, Erdenejargal Perenlei, Terry Wetz, Ron Hochstein, Doug Kentish, Martin Eady, Robert Holland, Tom Pool, Curt Steel, John Cassara, Monte Paulson, Bob Etter, Terry Babcock-Lumish, Gabrielle Giffords, Bill Carter, Julie McCarthy, Beverly Bell, Rinku Sen, Marybeth Holleman, Jim K. Cambon, Kevin D’Souza, Malcolm Shannon, Johanna Lafferty, Leslie Najarian, Frederic D. Schwarz, Iftikhar Dadi, William Finnegan, and Tara Parker.
Dr. Charles Blatchley of the physics department at Pittsburg State University read a late draft of the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions, as did George White, formerly of Nuexco Information Services, and Robert S. Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The improvements belong to them, and I claim every error.
A substantial portion of this book was written at the Mesa Refuge writers’ colony overlooking Tomales Bay in California. I am grateful to the Common Counsel Foundation for its support.
Kathryn Court of Viking Penguin was the editor of this book, and that has meant everything. She is a smart reader, a careful editor, and a delightful person in general. Branda Maholtz of Viking Penguin also gave the manuscript her thoughtful scrutiny and made it sharper. Deborah Weiss Geline made many wise suggestions during copyediting, and Bruce Giffords made it come together in production. Literary agent Brettne Bloom made it happen in the first place.
My family in Arizona believe
d in me.
Kevin Gass traveled with me to Yemen and Georgia, suffered through my uranium stories, made me laugh when I needed it, and spurred me on through the rough patches. It would be difficult to conceive of a finer man for a best friend.
Final and greatest thanks to Martha Brantley, whose kindness and wisdom helped shape every page.
New York City-Point Reyes Station, California
January 2007-June 2008
NOTES ON SOURCES
Translators were employed for some of the interviews conducted overseas, and the contents of a few of those conversations have been compressed into single running paragraphs with the back-and-forth questioning eliminated for the sake of readability.
A library the size of a small city might be necessary to house all the books, magazine articles, newspaper stories, academic papers, technical manuals, films, and government reports that have documented how uranium has moved the world in various ways. I used a tiny fraction of that available material in this book, and what follows is a guide to the sources from which I drew statistics, quotes, details, and anecdotes. Complete endnotes and citations can be found at www.tomzoellner.com.
INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 1: SCALDING FRUIT
The detail about the Japanese company at Temple Mountain is from “From X-Rays to Fission, A Metamorphosis in Mining,” by Clay T. Smith, in Geology of the Paradox Basin Fold and Fault Belt, Third Field Conference (Durango, Colo.: Four Corners Geological Society, 1960). The image of twitching sand is from the physicist Otto Frisch and was taken from The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986). Forced-labor policies in the Congo were discussed in “Pouch Letter 39,” a declassified memo written by the American OSS agent Wilbur O. Hogue, sent on July 5, 1944, and on file in the National Archives, “Records of the Office of Strategic Services,” Record Group 226, Entry 108C. Living conditions at Union Minière mine properties were disclosed in L’histoire du Congo, 1910-1945, by Jules Marchal (Borgloon, Belgium: Editions Paula Bellings, 1999), and in The Creation of Elisabethville, 1910-1940, by Bruce Fetter (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1976). Other details are in the official company history La Mangeuse de Cuivre: La Saga de l’Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, 1906-1966, by Fernand Lekime (Brussels: Didier Hatier, 1992). I am grateful to Pieterjan Van Wyngene for locating and translating the relevant sections of these books for me. Historical background on Shinkolobwe is in “Rip Veil from Belgian Congo Uranium Mine,” a Reuters dispatch reprinted in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Nov. 7, 1956; “Shinkolobwe: Key to the Congo,” by Ritchie Calder, in the Nation, Feb. 25, 1961; and “Africa Holds Key to Atomic Future,” by George Padmore, in the Chicago Defender, Sept. 8, 1945. More information on Shinkolobwe, including the Bloc Radioactif! anecdote, came from Inside Africa, by John Gunther (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). A vivid fictional account of Elisabethville is in the novel Radium, by Rudolf Brunngraber (London: G. G. Harrap, 1937). Larry Devlin’s memories are taken from a personal conversation with the author, as well as from his memoirs, Chief of Station, Congo: Fighting the Cold War in a Hot Zone (New York: Public Affairs, 2007). Some technical details of the recent activity at Shinkolobwe were taken from the report Assessment Mission of the Shinkolobwe Uranium Mine, Democratic Republic of Congo, written by the Joint United Nations Environment Program and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, dated 2004 and published in Geneva. A look at the underside of Congolese mineral trading is found in the July 2006 report Digging in Corruption: Fraud, Abuse, and Exploitation in Katanga’s Copper and Cobalt Mines, researched and published by Global Witness in London, as well as The State vs. The People: Governance, Mining, and the Transitional Regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo, by Netherlands Institute for Southern Africa, and published in Amsterdam in 2006. Illicit uranium trading is probed in “Letter Dated 18 July 2006 from the Chairman of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 1533 (2004) Concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo Addressed to the President of the Security Council, Conveying the Report of the Group of Experts,” available from the United Nations in New York. The issue is further explored in the Congolese government intelligence brief “Unofficial Exploitation of Uranium at the Shinkolobwe Mine in Katanga” [date and author unknown], and the news stories “‘Uranium’ Seized in Tanzania,” from the British Broadcasting Company, Nov. 14, 2002, and “Iran’s Plot to Mine Uranium in Africa,” in London’s Sunday Times, Aug. 6, 2006. Details on the Kinshasa reactor are from “Missing Keys, Holes in Fence, and a Single Padlock: Welcome to Congo’s Nuclear Plant,” by Chris McGreal, in the Guardian, Nov. 23, 2006. General information on Mobutu’s rule and the exploitation of Katanga is in Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Public Affairs, 2005). The practice and origins of the term Article Fifteen, information on the sorry state of the Kinshasa reactor, and other fascinating details on Mobutu’s reign and downfall are drawn from Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). An unforgettable account of life and death in the colonial period is in King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild (New York: Mariner Books, 1998).
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