ATOMIC ACTIVITY

As the U.N. Security Council resumed debate on the atom this week, the New York Herald Tribune published an enterprising 8,000-word roundup of atomic activity in 24 nations. The biggest news was that Canada has broken the U.S. monopoly and started stockpiling plutonium on its own. Other points:

In Ottawa, Dr. C. J. Mackenzie, National Research Council director, told Trib Correspondent Stephen White that the $20,000,000, Government-owned pilot plant at Chalk River, Ont. was bee-busy making plutonium and its byproducts. He added that the amount was "not at all comparable" to the U.S. production at Hanford, Wash., where there are several larger plutonium piles.

"Canada," said Dr. Mackenzie, "is not interested in building bombs. We have never known anything about the construction of bombs. . . . We do not have the industrial capacity to make bombs in great numbers, and no country can think of building a weapon of which it will have only one or two. Could we go to war with a single atom bomb?"

Even so, Dr. Mackenzie's revelation meant that the U.S. was no longer the only nation in the world to possess the wherewithal for making The Bomb. And the problems of eventual international control were growing while the Security Council talked. Trib Correspondent Peter Kihss reported that at least eight other nations have Government-sponsored programs of some significance, and that at least 14 more have already produced or located the vital raw materials.

Planning. The U.S. still has the biggest single atom program; it has spent some $2,500,000,000 and President Truman recently asked for another $443,000,000 in 1947-48. But last October Russia tripled her annual research budget (including the atom) to $1,200,000,000. Last month Sergei Vavilov, president of the Soviet Academy of Science, said that 100,000 Russians were now engaged in "scientific work." Soviet physicists had separated U-235 by thermal diffusion (a process used at Oak Ridge, Tenn.) at the Dnepropetrovsk power plant in 1942 before the Nazis destroyed it.

France is building an "atomic village" for 2,000 workers at Saclay, ten miles southwest of Paris, and has a large-scale program headed by Nobel Prizewinner (and Communist Party member) Frederic Joliot-Curie; his staff includes several men who helped plan the Chalk River project. Britain has set up five centers, with experimental piles near Oxford, and has already spent $120,000,000.

The lesser powers are concentrating on research rather than plutonium production--and they have some of the world's most brilliant atomic scientists. Niels Bohr, who back in 1939 pointed out theoretically that it was the rare U-235 which underwent fission when bombarded by slow neutrons, heads the Danish program. Two other Nobel Prizewinners, Manne Siegbahn and Theodor Svedberg, lead the work at Sweden's new laboratories. The Swiss Federal Council has voted over $4,000,000 for atomic research.

Prospecting. The prospectors are as busy as the physicists; Russia alone sent out 60 parties in 1946. Only two-fifths of the U.S.S.R. has yet been geologically explored; it has scattered uranium and thorium deposits. It also has access to Czechoslovakia's famed Jachymov mines and the new sources at Krzyzatka, Upper Silesia, of which the head of the Polish Geological Institute said last fall: "Poland may have the richest and largest uranium deposits in Europe." Most authorities believe that the Belgian Congo's Katanga region and Canada's Eldorado mine on Great Bear Lake contain the world's biggest uranium reserves.

A British firm in India's State of Travancore is working the best-known thorium deposit; last month, the Travancore Government announced the establishment of a processing factory there. Britain also has mines at home (Cornwall) and through the Empire, including Tanganyika, New Zealand (which recently announced that it could produce eight tons of uranium a year), Australia and Ceylon. There are deposits of some size in Scandinavia, Madagascar, Indonesia, Brazil, Argentina (which has banned export), Chile (which recently sent an expedition to Antarctica to investigate reported reserves there), China, Portugal and South Africa.

This widespread distribution is not surprising; uranium is the 25th element in abundance in the earth's crust, ranking just behind copper and ahead of tungsten. It is twice as common as zinc, four times as common as lead, and perhaps a thousand times as plentiful, as gold. In the last 50 years, some 230,000 tons of uranium ore have been mined. About 0.7% of ordinary uranium is U-235--and it takes less than five pounds of U-235 to make some bomb types.

Meanwhile, only in ex-enemy countries has the development of atomic weapons yet been outlawed.

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