THE ARCTIC SOURCE OF ATOMIC POWER
Neuberger, Richard L.
The Arctic Source Of Atomic Power By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER Vancouver, B. C. URANIUM atoms, disintegrating with force beyond human understanding, have brought an end to the war in the Pacific....
...At last he saw what he was searching for...
...From the uranium mined at Port Radium came the mysterious product which is the basic ingredient of the atom bomb...
...Winston Churchill, but I agree with his statement that very few of the people who protested the use of the atom bomb would have had to be in the first wave of men storming Japanese redoubts...
...Some of his pupils feared that the discovery of the atom bomb might end the human race...
...Physicians believe that perhaps sufficient quantities of radium can cure cancer...
...The story of the discovery of this Northern source of atomic power is one of the remarkable tales in the annals of the North American continent...
...In 1937, for example, Port Radium produced $525,100 worth of radium, and $271,100 worth of uranium salts...
...This report lay buried in the dusty archives of the Canadian Government for three decades...
...Bell head south ahead of schedule...
...Should we discard scientific progress because some symbols of progress can also be used as weapons of terrible destruction...
...Pitchblende contains uranium oxide...
...It is a hard, grim trip...
...This means that all nations, victor and vanquished alike, must understand the difficulties and the aspirations of others and must put aside the imperialistic greeds and the personal ambitions which led to the tragic conflict just concluded...
...Some people think it unwise to tap these elements and forces...
...In 1930, before LaBine made his strike, there were only 300 grams of radium set aside in the entire world...
...His hair stood on end when he came to the brief paragraph in Dr...
...He stood up excitedly...
...He was looking for the most valuable of all mineral properties—radium...
...The Congo ore yielded 20 milligrams per ton...
...I prefer this solution...
...THE story begins in the year 1900...
...Let us use pitchblende for this, but let us not surrender before the development of radio-active processes...
...It is the basic ingredient in the atom bomb...
...Yet it is true...
...No longer was he looking for copper...
...On the shores of Echo Bay they see strange rocks veined and seamed with many colors...
...And the uranium which disintegrated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki with such dreadful and historic effect came from a vast frozen lake in the Canadian Arctic, a lake larger than two of the Great Lakes yet practically unknown except to geographers...
...FOR years Belgium, with its Congo deposits of pitchblende, had monopolized the radium market...
...Bell's report...
...But now that the war is ended, let us use the pitchblende on Echo Bay for healing and not for demolition...
...Had Gilbert LaBine not read the ancient report of Charley Camsell and Dr...
...Copper was mere bagatelle in the game he was stalking now...
...A by-product of the radium was a large quantity of uranium salts...
...They call the place McTavish and so mark it on their map...
...The pitchblende ore assayed $5,000 a ton, more than enough for the $400-a-ton rate charged to barge it up the Mackenzie River system to the sidings of the Northern Alberta Railway near the 60th parallel...
...A Canadian prospector, rummaging through dusty files, had made a fabulous discovery...
...A few months after LaBine made his discovery, the radium monopoly held by Belgium was broken...
...James Mackintosh Bell, along the wilderness shores of Great Bear Lake, a few miles from the Arctic Circle in Canada's Northwest Territories...
...By 1940 there were 800 grams, most of them from pitchblende mined at Port Radium...
...It is a tale so fanciful that even in a movie it would tax human credulence...
...From the cockpit of the little plane, winging above lonely wilderness 1,400 miles north of the last railhead at Waterways, he looked for the veined rock and the shores of cobalt-bloom...
...Then one day in 1930 a young prospector named Gilbert LaBine was rummaging through the files of the Canadian Geological Survey...
...It gathered dirt and its pages withered, while Dr...
...He was not a hit-or-miss prospector...
...Mackintosh Bell, there might be no atom bomb, far less radium for hospitals and clinics, and the human race would have considerably less understanding of the cosmic forces and elemental power which have now been tapped...
...Is it not better that we learn to live in brotherhood with other men than that we retreat from the discoveries of science and invention...
...But I would work to bring about a world in which the phenomenal deposit on Great Bear Lake would be used to strike at cancer and not to tear apart thousands and millions of helpless human beings...
...He wanted to go to Great Bear Lake and file a copper claim...
...The plane circled and landed...
...He had studied geology, and in 1913 he had heard a lecture describing the significance of cobalt-bloom on rocks...
...Game is scarce...
...If we are to retreat before the atom bomb, why not from the airplane, from the cannon, from the internal-combustion engine, from gunpowder itself...
...They must beat the Autumn blizzards or they will be caught in the freezeup...
...I do not often agree with Mr...
...Where his campfire flickered that night, now stands Port Radium, the greatest deposit of pitchblende on earth...
...I would not have Gilbert LaBine cover up his remarkable finding in the Canadian wilderness...
...After all, what is the difference in morality between using a fire bomb which burns 100 people to death or an atom bomb which disintegrates 100,000 people...
...Camsell and Dr...
...Bell died and Charley Camsell rose in the Dominion service to be Commissioner of the Northwest Territories...
...Or should we make our moral and spiritual values match the development of scientific techniques...
...Bell writes in his report, "In the greenstones east of the McTavish area occur numerous interrupted stringers of calc-spar containing cahlcopyrite, and the steep rocky shores which here present themselves to the lake are often stained with cobalt-bloom and copper-green...
...If the crumbling atom is ever harnessed to the functions of peace, it will be breaking uranium particles that will do the job...
...The price of the mysterious metal, with its healing-qualities in the treatment of malignancy, dropped from $80,000 an ounce to $25,000...
...I wonder...
...I am glad we used the atom bomb because I think it saved American lives...
...The veins of the Belgian chemical trust, the L'Union Min-iere de Haut-Katanga, cannot compare in quality or quantity with the Port Radium deposits...
...LaBine hurried ashore...
...The Great Bear Lake pitchblende contains far more uranium oxide than any other deposit on earth...
...The Hare Indians are skeptical and suspicious of white men...
...Howard Kelly of the John Hopkins hospital, one of the world's foremost radiologists, said that LaBine's discovery would be historic...
...A young guide named Charley Camsell is taking a famous Canadian geologist, Dr...
...But the ore on Great Bear Lake yielded 120...
...LaBine dug into a slender bank-account to fly to Great Bear Lake with a Canadian bush pilot...
...A friend of mine, Bob Notson of the Portland Oregonian, teaches a Sunday School class...
...My friend answered that the discovery'simply emphasized the imperative need to respect the rights of others, to understand the problems of others, to end greed and avarice among nations and among peoples...
...Uranium is the heaviest of all the 92 elements known to science...
...It is like prescribing one punishment for killing one person but a worse penalty for killing more than one...
...Summer storms swamp canoes...
...THE atom bomb probably prevented the need of an American landing in Japan, a landing in which many of our bravest soldiers would have perished...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 37
