Word: uranium
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...sword of development. Companies like Union Carbide, working with the Reagan Administration's blessing, are moving to get rights to strip-mine the Lakota land, one of the poorest in the country, a bare plot of 4500 square miles in southwest South Dakota. Their goal is the fantastically lucrative uranium bed that sits under the land and that could, if properly cultivated, prove a panacea to the tribe's poverty. It could mean, among other things, hundreds of thousands of dollars for education and jobs. It could also scatter acres of carcinogenic dust and toxic uranium across the tribe...
...surface of things, then, seems rosy. The tribes own, altogether, 52 million acres of land with 5 percent of the nation's oil and gas reserves, 470 billion tons of high-quality coal and half of the nation's uranium supply, valued at $400 billion. The southwestern Navahos, with 160,000 members, are making $55 million a year from mining and pumping petroleum...
...Gainesville, Fla. In the late 1930s, as a professor at Penn State, Simons found that passing fluorine through an arc of carbon gas produced a few drops of clear liquid fluorocarbon, but his discovery had no obvious use. A few years later, when scientists could not find enough fissionable uranium to build the Abomb, Simons rescued the jar of fluorocarbon from a filing cabinet. The resulting chemical reactions yielded highly fissionable uranium 235. By the mid-1950s more than 800 new compounds containing fluorocarbons had been developed...
...that just after the day of the probable explosion. Col. Amos Horey, a nuclear scientist with the Israeli armed forces had visited South Africa and met with Abraham Rouse, the head of South Africa's Atomic Energy Board. Israel had reportedly already effected an exchange of South African enriched uranium for Israeli nuclear technology. A British team of investigative reporters, after surveying the evidence available at the time, concluded that the 1979 nuclear blast was an Israeli-South African warhead fired from a Belgian and American-made howitzer...
Scarcely three weeks before the inauguration of a new civilian government, the head of Argentina's atomic energy commission, Rear Admiral Carlos Castro Madero, made an announcement that U.S. experts had been warily expecting for some time: Argentina has become the tenth nation capable of producing enriched uranium and thus of making an atomic bomb. The others: the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China, which have bombs, plus West Germany, The Netherlands, Japan and South Africa...