(Both are stored in the Washington, DC, area in a massive facility that calls to mind an Indiana Jones movie.) The cube was donated to its collection by Merril Eisenbud of New York University Medical Center. The Smithsonian Institution has one in its collection alongside a slug of uranium from the Chicago Pile-1 reactor. We hope to eventually trace all the cubes and their stories back to a common source. Each has a different story for how it arrived at its current location, though most of the stories are incomplete at best. Ten other cubes, in private and public collections, have been identified around the country. The communications in the National Archives are replete with fantastic stories of con artists and smugglers trying to make a windfall profit and of scientists desperate to get their hands on small amounts of materials with which to continue their research. As the US was in no short supply of uranium ore by that time because of the work of the CDT, the US countered those offers with the going price of raw uranium metal, which was about six dollars per pound. Lilienthal ( 14 June 1949), box 49, record group 59, National Archives at College Park, MD. Documents show that every few months, US officials received sinister letters, like one to the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, David Lilienthal, presenting opportunities to purchase a quantity of cubes for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, lest they be sold to entities “not considered over-friendly to the United States.” 15 15. Keystone Press Agency, “ German couple charged with having uranium block,” 12 December 1952. Since the Allied Control Commission prohibited German citizens from possessing any amount of uranium, the black-market dealers assumed the cubes were a rare commodity and took considerable personal risk in attempting to sell them. Colby ( 16 March 1951), box 49, record group 59, National Archives at College Park, MD. The cubes fueled a black market in uranium throughout Eastern Europe after the war, peddled by what intelligence officer Joseph Chase described in a 16 March 1951 communiqué as a “ghostly gang” of profit seekers. After the war, he went on to be the American Physical Society’s first editor-in-chief and the founder of Physical Review Letters. Among the men involved in the mission was Samuel Goudsmit. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Harper (1962), p. The initial leg of the Alsos mission began in Italy and moved to Germany as the Allied military forces swept south. The most pressing task was to learn how far German physicists had gotten in their study of nuclear reactions. The mission broadly aimed to gather information and potentially capture data and instrumentation from all scientific disciplines from microscopy to aeronautics. In 1944, as Allied forces began moving into German-occupied territory, Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project, ordered a covert mission code-named Alsos (Greek word for “groves”) to take a small number of military personnel and scientists to the front lines in Europe to gather information on the state of the German scientific program.
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