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By Root 1218 0

for the rest of his life. The German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth was the first, in 1789, to derive a grey metal from Joachimsthal pitchblende. He called it uranium, after the recently discovered planet Uranus. Ceramicists found uranium a useful coloring substance for their glazes, for it imparted a yellow, orange, or brown color to the vessels they made. Early in the twentieth century, Joachimsthal and its surrounding area became a destination for Europe’s rich, seeking out the nourishing radioactive waters at Carlsbad, Marienbad, and Jachymov itself, site of the world’s first radon spa. A precocious American student named J. Robert Oppenheimer would later write his prep school thesis on the ores of Joachimsthal.1

After the First World War Joachimsthal uranium slipped from prominence—several recently found sites were richer—but with the discovery of uranium fission by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in late 1938 the Czech deposits assumed enormous strategic importance. The Erzgebirge was part of the Sudetenland, given to Hitler following the Munich Conference in September 1938. The German War Office learned in April 1939, a month after the German occupation, in violation of Munich, of all Czechoslovakia, that a nuclear weapon might be feasible. The physical chemist Paul Harteck and his colleague Wilhelm Groth wrote to military officials that ‘the newest development in nuclear physics... will probably make it possible to produce an explosive many orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional ones’. The War Office gave the Berlin-based Auer Company a contract for refining Joachimsthal’s uranium. The director of Auer’s laboratory, Nikolaus Riehl, had been a student of Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin. Thereafter, Professor Abraham Esau took charge of the project (though ‘project’ is perhaps too grand a term to describe it at this stage). By early the following year a good deal of Joachimsthal’s uranium was arriving at the War Office. German officials decided that spring to prohibit export of uranium compounds.2

The uranium at Joachimsthal gave the Germans a head start on their nuclear reactor, or burner, a machine needed to initiate controlled nuclear chain reactions. But the ore dug from the Erzgebirge was neither as abundant nor as pure as that found near the village of Shinkolobwe, in southern Katanga province of the Belgian Congo. Local people had mined the area for copper long before the Europeans arrived. In 1915 a Briton named Robert R. Sharp came upon a ridge that rose 35 feet above the Katangan countryside. It was speckled with green, yellow, and orange minerals— copper, presumably, in the first instance, but something very different in the second and third. Underneath the topsoil Sharp found a large vein of pitch-blende. A bit of digging revealed an extensive web of pitchblende and a colorful variety of other uranium minerals, in shades of yellow and orange. At Sharp’s prodding, the Belgians opened a mine on the Shinkolobwe outcrop in 1921.

The Belgian firm Union Minière du Haut-Katanga took charge of mining at Shinkolobwe. No one was yet interested in the uranium compound of pitchblende, but geologists knew that, where there was uranium, there was also radium, Marie Curie’s experimental interest and a substance with commercial appeal: manufacturers of wrist watches painted it on timepiece dials to make them glow in the dark, and some scientists hoped it might be used to treat cancer. Hidden away in three tons of uranium was a single gram of radium, 20,000 times more precious than gold. Union Miniere hired 200 local Bayeke men to work the mine. Four white company officials gave the orders and handed the Bayeke picks and shovels. The men chopped at the earth, dislodging heavy chunks of the yellow ore, which they placed in cloth sacks. Full sacks went by buffalo cart to the railhead at Kambove, next in British-built train cars to Lobito on the West African coast, and then by ship to Antwerp. Over time, steel drums replaced the inefficient sacks. And the miners went deeper into the earth, revealing ever-richer