Only when the ore has been concentrated to more than 20 percent U-235—
which is, thankfully, a job of massive industrial proportions—is there the danger of a
spontaneous chain reaction. But after that point, it becomes frighteningly simple. Two
lumps of enriched uranium slammed together with great force: This is the crude
simplicity of the atomic bomb. (A similar effect can be achieved through the compression
of plutonium, a by-product of uranium fission that is covered only briefly in this book.)
Though uranium’s lethal powers have been known for less than seventy years, man has
been tinkering with it at least since the time of Christ. Traces of it have been found as tinting
inside stained-glass mosaics of the Roman Empire. Indians in the American Southwest used
the colorful yellow soil as an additive in body paint and religious art. Bohemian peasants
found a vein of it in the lower levels of a silver mine at the end of the Dark Ages. They
considered it a nuisance and nicknamed it “bad-luck rock,” throwing it aside. The waste piles
lay there in the forest until the beginning of the twentieth century, when chemists in France
and Britain started buying uranium at a deep discount for the first experiments on
radioactivity. A West Virginia company briefly used the stuff as a red dye for a line of dishes
known as Fiesta Ware. But it was not until the late 1930s when an ominous realization began
to dawn among a handful of scientists in European and American universities: that the
overburdened nucleus of U-235 was just on the edge of cracking asunder and might be
broken with a single neutron.
This was the insight behind America’s Manhattan Project, which brought a startling ending
to World War II and initiated a new global order in which the hegemony of a nation would be
determined, in no small part, by its access to what had been a coloring dye for plates. As it
happened, a Japanese company had been among the outfi ts searching for ceramic glaze at
the Temple Mountain site in the years immediately before Pearl Harbor. They left several of
their packing crates abandoned in the Utah desert, sun-weathered kanji characters visible on
the wood. Had the government in Tokyo understood what really lay there at Temple Mountain,
the war might have ended differently.
Uranium did not just reshape the political world. Its fi rst detonation at Hiroshima also
tapped deep into the religious part of the human consciousness and gave even those who
didn’t believe in God a scientifi c reason to believe that civilization would end with a giant
apocalyptic burning, much as the ancient texts had predicted. A nonsupernatural method of
self- extinction had finally been discovered.
This unstable element has played many more roles in its brief arc through history,
controlling us, to a degree, even as we thought we were in control. It was a searchlight into
the inner space of the atom, an inspiration to novelists, a heroic war ender, a prophet of a
utopia that never arrived, a polluter, a slow killer, a waster of money, an enabler of terrorists,
the possible bringer of Armageddon, an excuse for war with Iraq, an incitement for possible
war in Iran, and now, too, a possible savior against global warming. Its trajectory has been
nothing short of spectacular, luciferous, a Greek drama of the rational age. The mastery and
containment of uranium—this Thing we dug up seventy years ago— will almost certainly
become one of the defi ning aspects of twenty-fi rst-century geopolitics. Uranium will always
be with us. Once dug up, it can never be reburied.
In this rock we can see the best and the worst of mankind: the capacity for scientific
progress and political genius; the capacity for nihilism, exploitation, and terror. We must fi nd
a way to make peace with it. Our continuing relationship with uranium, as well as our future
as a civilization, will depend on our capacity to resist mirroring that grim and never-ceasing
instability that lies within the most powerful tool the earth has to give.
There may be no better place to begin this story than at a different set of ruins. These are
in Africa, at the edge of a hole that will not stay closed.
