Fate of Uranium 

And its Origins Remain a Mystery 

** By PAT HAMMOND Sunday News Staff 

** Uranium taken by U.S. authorities from a German U-boat at the Portsmouth Naval Yard in 1945 could have been used in later U.S. atomic test blasts in Nevada and the Bikini atoll in the Pacific, according to one authority on the case. 

** Retired Penn State University environmental health professor Vilma Hunt said that based on the limited information available, she cannot rule out the possibility that the German uranium was used in the U.S. atomic attacks on Japan. It is, however, highly unlikely. 

** Hunt, who assisted in the investigation of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, said her attempts over the years to find out what happened to U-234's nuclear cargo led to no definitive answers. 

** Another researcher and author, Robert K. Wilcox, believes thei uranium was snapped up by the Manhattan project (the top-secret American effort that concluded in the development of the atom bomb) but hasn't a clue to its ultimate use. 

** The submarine, U-234, was en route to Japan with its cargo of uranium oxide -- enough, he says, to fuel two Japanese atom bomb attacks on the United States -- when it surrendered on May 19, 1945, Wilcox says. Wilcox, who has written books on a variety of military issues, believes Japan had its own secret atom bomb project and cites evidence that Japan may even have exploded a test device in northern Korea. 

** In his book, "Japan's Secret War," Wilcox argues that had Germany not surrendered on May 6, ordering its ships and submarines to turn themselves in to the Allies, the first cities to be destroyed by atomic bombs could have been American. Rather than Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which were bombed by the United States in August of that year. That is, if the Japanese had time to assemble them, he says. 

** In any event, Wilcox claims, the Japanese were closer to achieving the bomb than the American people knew -- or American authorities since may have wanted them to know. 

** Wilcox is in the process of updating his 1985 book for a reprinting in August by Marlowe & Company (New York). 

 
Uranium on German Sub Could have Fueled Two... 

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