Uranium: War, Energy, and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner

Author:Tom Zoellner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Science
ISBN: 9781101024522
Publisher: Viking Books
Published: 2009-02-07T05:00:00+00:00

Luck up! Luck up!

Here comes the pit boss

And he has his bright light

In the night

Already lit!

Wismut had become, by that point, a “state within a state,” in the words of the historian Rainer Karlsch, functioning as a semiautonomous fiefdom within East Germany. There were seventeen towns under its watch. It had its own hospitals, police, and court system. The mines had contributed up to 80 percent of the uranium for the Soviet nuclear program, and its managers were rewarded with generous allocations of equipment.

The men and women of Wismut were reminded of their duty to Communism, and how the uranium played an important role in stopping the global menace of capitalism. They were told that America had been threatening the USSR with nuclear weapons and that only a strong counterarsenal could save lives. “Everyone believed that since they had bombed Nagasaki, [the Americans] would bomb us, too,” recalled Walter Hegenbart. Signs all over proclaimed ORE FOR PEACE.

The first promotional film for Wismut was shot in 1959. Laced with strange homoerotic imagery, it depicts a team of three men stripped down to their shorts, rhythmically unloading piles of uranium ore from cars to the sound of orchestra music. Others are pushing blasting caps into walls dripping with moisture, and another crew is hosing debris off the cart tracks. Tulip-shaped buckets dump the black stones in the crushing mill. The uranium miner is portrayed as a virile national hero.

A grittier view was presented in the movie Sunseekers, directed by the auteur Konrad Wolf, who happened to be the brother of the national spymaster Markus Wolf. The director Wolf was regarded as a creative genius in his native Germany and he had credibility with the Communist authorities. In 1957, Wolf received permission to shoot a new film in the heart of the uranium fields.

In retrospect, it is a miracle that Sunseekers was ever made. It tells the story of a young woman named Lutz who is arrested in a barroom brawl and sentenced to mine uranium in the Ore Mountains, depicted here as a grim wasteland of rock heaps and muddy roads, with a savage mix of convicts, ex-SS soldiers, and Communists forced to live there in quest of radioactive fuel. The mostly German miners are lorded over by their Russian overseers, who demand “uranium every hour” and are slow to replace fraying electric cables in the mines. Lutz at first falls in love with an alcoholic miner named Gunther, who insists, “This is the best work there is! You can hear the uranium crackling!” But she eventually winds up with a moody one-armed pit boss named Beier, who seems to embody all the sufferings of postwar Germany. He dies underground in a fire started by one of the defective cables—literally trapped in a tomb of uranium.

The film is not without some patriotic content. The opening crawl reads: “The flash over Japan was meant to illuminate the American century. To protect itself and help world peace, the USSR had to break the atomic bomb monopoly.

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