CHAPTER 5: TWO RUSHES
The buying policies of the Atomic Energy Commission and the widespread social effects of uranium mining on the Colorado Plateau are examined in Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West, by Michael Amundson (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2002), and Quest for the Golden Circle: The Four Corners and the Metropolitan West, 1945- 1970, by Arthur R. Gomez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). Also of great help was the dissertation “A History of the Uranium Industry on the Colorado Plateau,” by Gary Shumway, University of Southern California, Jan. 1970. Shumway’s master’s thesis, “The Development of the Uranium Industry in San Juan County, Utah,” Brigham Young University, July 1964, also provided source material. Some background on the geology of the Colorado Plateau and the initial mining bonanza was taken from “The Uranium Rush,” by Tom Zoellner, the American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Summer 2000; The Redrock Chronicles, by Tom H. Watkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and “The Time of the Great Fever,” by Larry Meyer, American Heritage, June/July 1981. The “Good for nothing” quote originally appeared in Grand Memories, by Phyllis Cortes (Grand County, Utah: Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, 1978), and was quoted in “Hot Rocks Made Big Waves,” by Amberly Knight, in Utah Historical Quarterly, Winter 2001, as well as the Fall 2006 edition of Canyon Legacy, the journal of the Dan O’Laurie Museum in Moab. The hyperbolic True West article was reprinted in Canyon Legacy, Summer 2006. The bogus uranium foundations were first reported in “Quackery in the Atomic Age,” in BusinessWeek, Aug. 29, 1953. Some of the quotes from Utah miners in the 1950s—including Jerry Anderson and Oren Zufelt—were drawn from an archive of oral history at California State University, Fullerton, established by Professor Gary Shumway. The naming controversy in Moab comes from The Far Country: A Regional History of Moab and La Sal, Utah, by Faun McConkie Tanner (Salt Lake City: Olympic Publishing, 1976). The anecdotes about the circling airplanes and the staked highway are from One Man’s West, by David Lavender (New York: Doubleday, 1964). Quotes from Paddy Martinez were taken from “The Coming Thing,” by Daniel Lang, in the New Yorker, Mar. 21, 1953. The Popeye cartoon was described in “Uranium on the Cranium,” an essay by Michael Admundson in the anthology Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, ed. Admundson and Scott C. Zeman (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005). Some details on the colorful life of Charlie Steen were drawn from “Uranium Millionaire,” by Jack Goodman, the New York Times, Oct. 17, 1954; “Uranium Mining Stocks Feed Gambling Fever,” by Jack R. Ryan, the New York Times, June 20, 1954; “Uranium: Jackpot in Utah,” in BusinessWeek, Aug. 1, 1953; “Ordinary Was Radioactive to Charlie Steen, the Uranium King,” by Gary Massaro, Rocky Mountain News, Mar. 16, 2006; and “Fallout in the Family,” by Ward Havarky, in Denver’s Westword, Feb. 19, 1998. But this section depended most heavily upon Uranium Frenzy, by Raye Ringholz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), the definitive history of the uranium story in the American Southwest, which also provides the most comprehensive account available of Steen’s Mi Vida strike and the efforts of the AEC to cover up the radioactive disaster. The angry speech at Texas Western College, as well as several other episodes in the life of Steen, and of Utah’s stock bubble, were drawn from Ringholz’s impressive work. John Black’s remembrances were in Blue Mountain Shadows, Winter 2001, published by the San Juan County Historic Society. Tom McCourt’s recollections of Moab, as well as his reflections on patriotism, were taken from White Canyon: Remembering the Little Town at the Bottom of Lake Powell (Price, Utah: Southpaw Publications, 2003). Joe Blosser’s quote is in “Uranium Is People,” by Paul Schubert, in Empire magazine, reprinted in Reader’s Digest, Mar. 1953. The Dr. Seuss incident is related in “Man on Probation in Attempt to Extort Dr. Seuss Estate,” by Onell R. Soto, in the San Diego Union Tribune, Aug. 21, 2004. Background on the AEC cover-up was drawn from The Myths of August, by Stewart Udall (New York: Pantheon, 1994). The Navajo section drew from the excellent If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans, by Peter Eichstaedt (Santa Fe, N.M.: Red Crane Books, 1994), which contains details on the economics of reservation mining, as well as interviews with miners, including Ben Jones, and information on hazards that still remain. “Blighted Homeland,” a four-part series by Judy Pasternak in the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 19-22, 2007, examined the lasting health and environmental impacts and was the source of the “Saudi Arabia” remark. The story “Udall: Navajo ‘Cancer Free’ Until Uranium,” by Kathy Helms, in the Gallup Independent, Nov. 15, 2007, had further historical background. The comments of the Navajo miner Willie Johnson came from “Toxic Targets,” by Jim Motavalli, in E magazine, July 1998. An evocative fictional account of the afterlife of a uranium town can be found in the novel Yellowcake, by Ann Cummins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Health data comes from “Lung Cancer in a Nonsmoking Uranium Miner,” by Karen B. Mulloy et al., in Environmental Health Perspectives 109 (2001); “The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People,” by Doug Brugge and Rob Goble, in American Journal of Public Health, Sept. 2002; “Lung Cancer Risk Among German Male Uranium Miners,” by B. Grosche et al., in the British Journal of Cancer, Oct. 2006; and “Diseases of Uranium Miners and Other Underground Miners Exposed to Radon,” by J. M. Samet and D. W. Mapel, in Environmental and Occupational Medicine, 1998. The foremost historians of the postwar uranium era in Europe are Rainer Karlsch of the Free University of Berlin and Zbynek Zeman of Oxford University. Their recently translated book Uranium Matters: Central European Uranium in International Politics, 1900-1960 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), was a source for a few details in this chapter, including the supposed “acts of sabotage” at Wismut and the bedsheets at St. Joachimsthal. Details on the diplomatic background to the Czechoslovakian-Soviet accords, as well as a wealth of information about the Jachymov gulag, come from two illuminating articles by Zbynek Zeman: “The Beginnings of National Enterprise Jachymov (Joachimsthal),” in Der Anschnitt, Mar. 1998, and “Czech Uranium and Stalin’s Bomb,” in Historian, Autumn 2000. Frantisek Sedivy was kind enough to give me a copy of his autobiography, The Legion of the Living (Prague: Eva-Milan Nevole, 2003), which supplied some of the details of his incarceration. He also wrote a novel based on his experience called Under the Tower of Death (Prague: Eva-Milan Nevole, 2003). Translations of key portions of these important books were supplied to me by Marketa Naylor. The anecdote about the dog and the description of the town in St. Joachimsthal comes from “Soft Norms in a Spa,” by Joseph Wechsberg, in the New Yorker, May 3, 1952. Quotes from Joseph Stalin were in Stalin and the Bomb, by David Holloway (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), and also cited in Bomb Scare, by Joseph Cirincione (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Using previously sealed documents from the Eastern bloc, Norman Naimark pieced together an account of the labor situation at Wismut for a section of his book The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-49 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1995), from which I garnered a few details. Information about the culture and operations of Wismut were drawn from materials on exhibit at the excellent Museum Uranbergau in Schlema, Germany; I received translation assistance from the curator, Herman Meinel, and from Martha Brantley, who helped me speak with former Wismut miners. Some health statistics were taken from “Wismut: Uranium Exposure Revisited,” by Heinz Otten and Horst Schulz, a research paper published by the International Labor Organization (New York: United Nations, 1998). The former Wismut manager Nikolai Grishin disclosed some state secrets in “The Saxony Mining Operation,” reprinted in Soviet Economic Policy in Postwar Germany (New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1953). The extent of Western intelligence knowledge about Wismut, though colored by some period bias, can be found in the background paper “Zhukov and the Atomic Bomb,” author unknown (Munich: Radio Free Europe, 1957), as well as Forced Labor in the “People’s Democracies,” by Richard K. Carlton (Munich: Free Europe Committee, 1955). The pol
icies and practices at Wismut were examined in the unpublished doctoral dissertation “The Quest for Uranium: The Soviet Uranium Mining Industry in Eastern Germany, 1945-1967,” by Traci Heitschmidt, on file in the library at the University of California-Santa Barbara. The anecdote about the hidden Soviet enrichment plants comes from Shadow Flights: America’s Secret Air War Against the Soviet Union, by Curtis Peebles (New York: Presidio Press, 2000), and the declassified background paper titled “On the Soviet Nuclear Scent,” by Henry S. Lowenhaupt of the Central Intelligence Agency (undated). Some information about the gulag period is drawn from Jachymov: The City of Silver, Radium, and Therapeutic Water, by Hana Hornatova (Prague: Medeia Bohemia, 2000). The discovery stories were recounted in “Miner’s Luck,” by Henry Winfred Splitter, in Western Folklore, Oct. 1956, as well as History of California, by Theodore Henry Hittell (San Francisco: N. J. Stone, 1898).
CHAPTER 6: THE RAINBOW SERPENT
Some of the color of the early days of Australia’s uranium rush comes from The Uranium Hunters, by Ross Annabell (Adelaide, Australia: Rigby, 1971). The petroglyph of the Rainbow Serpent is discussed in “Flood Gave Birth to World’s Oldest Religion,” by Leigh Dayton, in New Scientist, Nov. 11, 1996. This section could not have been written without the help of Joe Fisher, who donated a scrupulously documented account of his life: a self-published autobiography in two volumes. These valuable books are Trials and Triumphs in the Northern Territory and Northern Australia: From Cape York to the Kimberleys, 1954- 2002 (Melbourne, Australia: S. R. Frankland, 2002) and Battles in the Bush: The Batavia Goldfields of Cape York (Melbourne, Australia: S. R. Frankland, 1998). Political background on the uranium debate comes partially from “The Rise of Anti-Uranium Protest in Australia,” by Sigrid McCausland, a paper submitted to the Australasian Political Studies Association conference, Oct. 2000; Uranium on Trial, by Stuart Butler, Robert Raymond, and Charles Watson Moore (Sydney: New Century Press, 1977); the newspaper article “Kakadu: ‘Scruffy and a Bore,’” in the Northern Territory News, Aug. 8, 1978, reprinted in Fisher, Trials and Triumphs and Battles in the Bush; “Yellowcake Country: Australia’s Uranium Industry,” a paper prepared in 2006 by Beyond Nuclear Initiative, Melbourne, Australia; and “Nuclear Power No Solution to Climate Change,” a paper prepared for Friends of the Earth et al., Sydney, Sept. 2005. The history of the town of Jabiru is covered in Yellowcake and Crocodiles, by John Lea and Robert Zehner (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986). The opinionated and well-written memoir Jabiluka: The Battle to Mine Australia’s Uranium, by Tony Gray (Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing, 1994), provided key context and details, as did Kakadu: The Making of a National Park, by David Lawrence (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Publishing, 2000). “ERA 2005 Annual Report,” prepared by Energy Resources of Australia, has some details about the operation of the Ranger Mine. An impressive amount of original research on the Uranium Club can be found in Yellowcake, by J. Taylor and Michael Yokell (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1979). A layman’s guide to their activities is in The Politics of Uranium, by Norman Moss (New York: Universe Publishers, 1984). A contemporaneous report of the club’s later days is in “‘It Worked for the Arabs . . .’” in Forbes, Jan. 15, 1975. Some of the lore of Rio Tinto was drawn from The Cooperative Edge: The Internal Politics of International Cartels, by Debora L. Spar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). Sir Val Duncan’s imperious quote was recalled in “A Very British Coup” in the Daily Mail, Mar. 13, 2006. Some continental history was taken from Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance, 1788-2001, by Richard Broome (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002); Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, by Peter Sutton (New York: George Braziller, 1988); and Arguments About Aboriginals, by L. R. Hiatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This section also drew from newspaper accounts of the Jabiluka protests in the Age, Sydney Morning Herald, and Northern Territorial News.
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