pdf - WHALE

appeared destined for defeat." 5 Not only defeat, but for "those in
the know" in late 1944 and early 1945, the possibility was one of
ignominious defeat and horrible carnage.
If the stocks of weapons grade uranium ca. late 1944 - early
1945 were about half of what they needed to be after two years of
research and production, and if this in turn was the cause of Senator
Byrnes' concern, how then did the Manhattan Project acquire the
large remaining amount or uranium 235 needed in the few months
from March to the dropping of the Little Boy bomb on Hiroshima
in August, only five months away How did it accomplish this feat,
if in feet after some three years of production it had only produced
less than half of the needed supply of critical mass weapons grade
uranium Where did its missing uranium 235 come from And how
did it solve the pressing problem of the fuses for a plutonium bomb
Of course the answer if that if the Manhattan Project was
incapable of producing enough enriched uranium in that short
amount of time - months rather than years - then its stocks had to
have been supplemented from external sources, and there is only
one viable place with the necessary technology to enrich uranium
on that scale, as seen in the previous chapter. That source was Nazi
Germany. But the Manhattan Project is not the only atom bomb
project with some missing uranium.
Germany too appears to have suffered the "missing uranium
syndrome" in the final days prior to and immediately after the end
of the war. But the problem in Germany's case is that the missing
uranium it not a few tens of kilos, but several hundred tons. At this
juncture, it is worth citing Carter Hydrick's excellent research at
length, in order to exhibit the full ramifications of this problem:
From June of 1940 to the end of the war, Germany seized 3,500 tons
of uranium compounds from Belgium - almost three times the amount
Groves had purchased.... and stored it in salt mines in Strassfurt,
Germany. Groves brags that on 17 April, 1945, as the war was
winding down, Alsos recovered some 1,100 tons of uranium ore from
Strassfurt and an additional 31 tons in Toulouse, France ..... And he
claims that the amount recovered was all that Germany had ever held,
asserting, therefore, that Germany had never had enough raw material
5 Hydrick, op. cit, p. 13.
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