Gathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943-1954

by Jonathan E. Helmreich

Overview

This is a comprehensive study of one of the most startling examples of dollar diplomacy—the effort of the United States and the United Kingdom to monopolize the free world's supply of uranium and thorium during and immediately following World War II.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691610399
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #472
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d)

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Gathering Rare Ores

The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943-1954

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By Jonathan E. Helmreich

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-04738-6

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CHAPTER 1

Discovering the Need

In the summer of 1939 uranium was not an item which made much impression upon international affairs, world trade, or the public in general. Radium, with which it is usually associated when mined, was far better known for its use in scientific research and medical facilities. The ceramics industry did employ uranium to produce red and orange hues in its products, yet only about 100 tons of the metal were consumed the world over each year. Nearly 80 percent of this came from a mine at Shinkolobwe in Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo. When the threat of war increased the demand for copper and tungsten steel, even that mine was closed by its proprietors so that resources could be concentrated on exploitation of neighboring copper and cobalt mines.

This was to change, as did so much else, in the next few months. Scientific discoveries began to suggest the possibility of creation of a new and terribly powerful weapon from uranium. The outbreak of war lent an urgency both to the researchers' investigations and to the quest for the rare metal without which they could make little practical progress.

The desire of Great Britain and the United States in the nineteen forties and early fifties to gain control of foreign deposits of uranium and thorium which could provide the fuel for explosive atomic devices necessitated a major diplomatic campaign. The stakes were high and required unusual effort that nevertheless had to be sheltered from the public eye. Secrecy was essential both because of the danger of leakage of significant information and because the issues and tactics employed were not readily understandable. Diplomacy was carried out by an unusual mixture of military, civilian, and diplomatic personnel. Its twists and turns proceeded from technological discoveries and espionage as well as from a variety of conflicts: those of great powers as enemies, as differing allies, and as negotiators with independent and sometimes wary small powers. The dual goals were to assure the United States and Britain of a sufficient supply of uranium for their own weapons program and to deny their enemies access to the same material in a manner thorough enough to hamper or even forestall their atomic programs. Success was achieved on the first count, though at times the British feared their own research would be starved by the huge American appetite for radioactive ores. On the second count, success was more limited, though Russian progress (more so than the German) was no doubt slowed and made more expensive.

The quest for uranium reflected and furthered the transition of the role of major enemy of Britain and the United States from Germany to the Soviet Union after World War II. Its story therefore sheds light on a key source of tension and on the posture of the Western allies in the early years of the Cold War. Indeed, the American-British attempt to gain a preclusive duopoly on uranium regardless of whatever proposals for international cooperation were laid before the United Nations may arguably be among the prime origins of the Cold War, at least to the extent the Russians knew of the Anglo-American effort through their intelligence system.

The Early Search: Leslie Groves and Edgar Sengier

Recognition came slowly in the United States that uranium might be valuable to a weapons program. At the end of 1938 an isolated experiment in Berlin had suggested that uranium was fissionable. This was corroborated by further experiments. By the close of 1939 researchers at Columbia University in New York were investigating the possibility of creating a limited chain reaction, that is, of continuing fission once it had been initiated. Among them were the Italian scientist Enrico Fermi and the Hungarian Leo Szilard. Fear that the Nazis might be the first to achieve an explosive device utilizing the immense force of fission led Szilard to press for support from the U.S. government. Concerned also that the Germans might gain access to the best known source of uranium in the Belgian Congo, he and fellow Hungarian physicist Eugene Wigner approached Albert Einstein, then in residence in Princeton. As Einstein knew the Belgian royal family, they thought him the right person to warn the Belgians. Einstein agreed to write a letter, though to a lower-ranking individual. First a copy would be sent to the U.S. department of state. Were no response received, the letter would then be sent in two weeks to the Belgians.

No prompt reply came from the state department, but the letter to Belgium was not mailed. Szilard in conversation with Alexander Sachs, an economist with access to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, learned that if government support were to be won the somewhat pessimistic views of Enrico Fermi and others at Columbia regarding the possibility of a fission bomb had to be overcome. Einstein again agreed to sign a letter, this one to Roosevelt. Drafted by Szilard and Sachs, it indicated that propagation of a chain reaction was imminent. It also warned that a frighteningly powerful bomb might conceivably be constructed, urged government awareness and support of research activities, and noted that the Congo was the best source of uranium and that Germany had stopped sale of Czech uranium.

After meeting with Sachs on 11 October 1939, Roosevelt appointed an Advisory Committee on Uranium. The need for defense research in the still neutral United States became more clear by June 1940, when the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) was created under the leadership of Dr. Vannevar Bush. Bush, an inventive applied mathematician and electrical engineer, was a former vice-president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently head of the Carnegie Institution. The NDRC supervised the Uranium Committee until November 1941, when that committee's work became so important that it was placed directly under the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the governmental agency which also oversaw the National Defense Research Committee.

Fission research accelerated. In June 1942 the U.S. Army formed an engineer district — eventually named the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) — to assist with the effort. Among its chief responsibilities would be construction of production plants. It made little progress until in mid-September a newly promoted brigadier general, Leslie R. Groves, was appointed its head. Former deputy chief of construction in the Corps of Engineers, Groves was able, hard-driving, contentious, and blunt. He had a record of getting things done. Smart, he did not mind letting others be misled into thinking he was not. Thorough in preparation, he was nevertheless known to take decisions and actions abruptly. Groves had a strong sense of intuition about people and would follow it with a remarkably high degree of success, as one colleague noted. In the Manhattan Engineering District he would develop a policy of compartmentalization of activities and knowledge so that few persons other than himself knew all that was going on. For security reasons also, he would work with as few people as possible.

On 17 September 1942, the day Groves was informed of his new duties, he discussed with an assistant the lack of uranium. There were few developed uranium mining sites in the Western hemisphere, for the market for uranium and most of the metals with which it is commonly found had simply not warranted their discovery or exploitation. In 1939 uranium imported to the United States brought only about 83 cents per pound, hardly enough to encourage much prospecting. Some had been found along with radium in Colorado, but its mining there had dropped off sharply after richer deposits discovered in the Congo were mined at far lower costs. The Eldorado company in Canada did produce uranium as a by-product of its gold mining ventures, but the amount was limited.

Groves quickly learned that the only available supply of uranium was 1,200 tons of high-grade (65 percent) ore of which the MED had learned almost by accident ten days earlier. It was stored on Staten Island by the African Metals Corporation, an affiliate of Union Minière du Haut Katanga.

Union Minière (UM) was a partial affiliate of the Société Générale de Belgique (SGB), one of the two or three largest investment concerns in Europe and one of the oldest. Stock in UM was also held by individuals and holding firms in a number of countries, and stock in some of these investment firms was in turn held by the Société Générale. Belgium corporate law had no "arm-length" provisions, and interlocking directorates were common. The connection between UM and SGB has traditionally been close. In 1981, well after UM had been nationalized by Zaire in 1967, the company would become a wholly owned subsidiary of SGB. In the 1930s Union Minière was deeply involved in the discovery and development of non-ferrous metals in Upper Katanga, in the southwest section of the huge African country first established as the Congo Free State by Belgian King Leopold II in 1885 and eventually turned over to Belgium as a colony in 1908.

The uranium which interested Groves had been brought to New York on the order of Edgar Sengier, the managing director of Union Minière. Enterprising and far-sighted, he had encouraged vast investments by his firm in developing the initially unprofitable copper mines of Katanga. Although concentrating on copper, Sengier became aware that uranium might be of greater value than most people thought when he visited a fellow Union Minière director, Lord Stonehaven, in England in May 1939. Lord Stonehaven arranged for Sengier to meet Sir Henry Tizard, director of the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and deeply involved in British defense research.

Tizard knew that an outside possibility existed that a powerful bomb might be created from uranium, but he judged that possibility as only one in a hundred thousand. Nevertheless, alerted by a British researcher of the desirability of denying uranium to Germany and securing it for Britain, he asked of the Union Minière officials that his government be granted option to purchase all radium-uranium ore produced by the UM mine at Shinkolobwe in Katanga. Tizard did not press the matter vigorously, for he doubted the utility of uranium. Sengier refused the proposition, perhaps because the price the Belgian believed his ore was worth had not been offered. He did agree to let the scientist know of any abnormal demand. In parting, Tizard warned that the Belgian held "something which may mean a catastrophe to your country and mine if this material were to fall in the hands of a possible enemy."

Sengier was next approached a few days later by French scientists led by Frederic Joliot-Curie. The latter was the son-in-law of the famous scientists and co-winner with his wife in 1935 of a Nobel Prize for work in nuclear physics and radiation. Would Sengier join them in an effort to explode a uranium fusion bomb in the Sahara? Sengier accepted the proposal in principle and agreed to provide the necessary ore. Outbreak of war and the invasion of France, however, prevented any development of these plans.

The possibility that Belgium would be invaded and communication between Brussels and the Congo cut off led the directors of Union Minière to take precautions. Sengier was quietly sent to New York in September 1939, a few weeks prior to his sixtieth birthday, with full powers to conduct the firm's business should contacts with its European directors be broken. Before leaving Brussels, Sengier ordered existing supplies of radium in Belgium and uranium ore at the refining plant at Oolen, Belgium, near Antwerp to be shipped to Britain and the United States. The radium arrived, but shipment of the Oolen ores was delayed; they fell into German hands in June 1940 when Belgium was overrun. Some 3,500 tons of uranium compounds, some already partially processed, thus became available — barring bureaucratic holdups — to the German atomic research program. Stockpiled ore in the Congo was shipped to New York promptly; it was this ore which eventually attracted the attention of the MED.

To Sengier's surprise, American officials at first took little interest in the uranium. In March 1942 Sengier talked with Thomas K. Finletter and Herbert Feis of the state department. These economic experts were more interested in cobalt than uranium, even after Sengier suggested that the latter was more important. Twice in April he raised the matter without significant response. This was no doubt because the state department did not know about the current U.S. research activities and indeed would not be informed until just before the Yalta conference of February 1945 — such was the secrecy surrounding the project and so closely did Roosevelt hold his cards to his vest. Yet, as General Groves points out in his memoirs, the connection of valuable radium with uranium was widely known, and there were enough articles on recent research in the press to suggest the importance of uranium on its own.

Apparently the Executive Committee of the Advisory Committee on Uranium (now known as the S-I Committee) chaired by Dr. James B. Conant, the chemist president of Harvard University, also saw no need to acquire any additional supplies of uranium. At least that was the position taken at its 9 July 1942 meeting. It was expected that sufficient uranium might be obtained via the Canadian firm of Eldorado Gold Mines, Ltd., from which two small (6 to 8 and 5 tons) orders had been purchased in 1941. Eldorado's old mine on Great Bear Lake would, however, have to be drained and brought into repair. In order to persuade the company to take these steps, an order for 60 tons of oxide, the least amount necessary to make the re-opening economically possible, had been placed. But then in August the S-I Committee learned that Boris Pregel, a White Russian who in 1917 fled to France and established various connections including that of a sales agent for Union Minière and also for Eldorado, was attempting to purchase 500 tons of Sengier's ore. On 11 September, Bush, as head of the National Defense Research Committee, suggested to the army the imposition of export controls on uranium.

In a marked alteration of its July posture, the S-I Executive Committee recommended the imposition of export controls and the purchase of Sengier's ore. It was pushed to this point by the realization that otherwise it might, because of Pregel's connection with Eldorado, be buying ore for shipment to the United States which was not mined near the Arctic Circle but already on an island in the middle of New York Harbor. Also, Sengier's hand-sorted ore averaged 65 percent uranium oxide, while Colorado and Canadian ores held only .2 percent. That this fact may have been the chief motive for the change in the attitude of the U.S. officials is indicated by the Committee's confidence that a sufficient supply of uranium oxide for the war effort was available and its acceptance of an army recommendation that the flooded mine at Shinkolobwe in the Congo not be reopened.

Colonel K. D. Nichols, an experienced hand at the Manhattan Engineering District, discussed all this with Groves on 17 September 1942. Both were more concerned about the limited ore supplies than was the committee. They acted promptly. Nichols arranged export controls through the state department, and the next day he visited Sengier at his office in the Cunard Building. Once the Belgian was convinced that Nichols meant to deal seriously, matters moved quickly. Within an hour it was agreed that the United States would buy all the ore stored on Staten Island and that the Americans could have first option on the 1,000 tons stockpiled above ground in the Congo; these were to be shipped immediately. Contracts were worked out later and signed on 19 October. To ensure secrecy, correspondence was limited, and the Federal Reserve Bank, which oversees banking activities in the United States, was instructed not to mention the transactions in its reports.

A Joint Anglo-American Effort

If in 1942 the S-I Committee was concerned only with procuring uranium for the war effort, by the following year this viewpoint had changed. Research had progressed to the point that creation of a bomb seemed a possibility, although the time frame was still vague. The implications this held for the future balance of world power were great. Groves in particular was concerned that at the war's end North American supplies of uranium might be exhausted and the United States would have no control over the world's best source in the Congo. Those ores were especially needed because of the physical and chemical properties of uranium and the inefficiencies of the technology then available to separate the small amounts of fissionable isotopes in the element.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Gathering Rare Ores by Jonathan E. Helmreich. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• List of Abbreviations, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• 1. Discovering the Need, pg. 1
• 2. The Cornerstone: Agreement with Belgium, pg. 15
• 3. Efforts at Preemption: Brazil, The Netherlands, and Sweden, pg. 42
• 4. Price, Politics, and Pride: Further Negotiations with Belgium, pg. 72
• 5. Reluctant Anglo-American Collaboration, pg. 97
• 6. The Difficulties of Sharing, pg. 134
• 7. Much Effort, Limited Gain: Continuing Global Negotiations, pg. 158
• 8. Raising the Compensation: The Belgian Export Tax, pg. 191
• 9. Atoms for Peace, Atoms for War, pg. 225
• 10. Preemption and Monopoly in Retrospect, pg. 247
• Notes, pg. 263
• Bibliography, pg. 287
• Index, pg. 293