The capture of U-234, one of the biggest U-boats of the Third Reich fleet, and its illustrious passengers -- German scientists and high Luftwaffe officers -- made vivid headlines, but not a word of the secret uranium leaked out, Wilcox notes. 

Official papers documenting the existence of the uranium were not declassified for many years, and when Wilcox drew attention to the uranium cargo in his book, in the context of Japan's effort to build its own atomic bomb in World War II, nobody seemed to take much notice either, he said this month. 

Perhaps Americans didn't find credible his reports that Japan had relocated atomic bomb production facilities to Japanese occupied North Korea in 1945, Wilcox suggests. 

But now, with growing U.S. anxiety over the nuclear weapons development program in communist North Korea, Americans may be more willing to take his earlier revelations seriously, he says. 

In his book Wilcox traces Japan's determined development effort from its earliest days through possible testing.Wilcox speaks of a network of Spanish spies working in North America, U-234's aborted attempt to deliver 1,235 pounds of valuable, 77 percent pure uranium oxide to Japan, and atomic research centers operating in North Korea. 

Wilcox, who at 51 lives in Sherman Oaks, Calif., said in an interview this month that his book was ahead of its time. "In 1985 the country wasn't ready for the story," he said. "Japan has always been looked at as the victim of the bomb. And so a lot of people didn't like the book. "To be very base about it, there is a whole liberal element that does not want Japan to look like anything but the victim. But the fact is the Japanese tried very hard to make the bomb and would have dropped it." 

The main thrust of the book is the Japanese did have an atomic bomb program, Wilcox said. "The Japanese knew an atomic bomb was feasible but their problem was uranium." 

In his reprinted book, WiIcox will introduce information that Japan near the very end of the war appropriated 25 million yen (about $100 million on today's scale) to find uranium. Much of the money was spent buying up all the uranium in Shanghai and around Japanese-occupied China in factories where it had been used for years in pottery-making. 

"Their program did not get going until the end of the war," Wilcox said, "when they were searching for a miracle weapon. We were getting ready to invade Japan, they knew that, and they were going to do all they could to stop it. 

"They would have dropped it on us if they had been able to," Wilcox said. "U-234 was one of their last-ditch attempts to get the uranium they needed, although I don't think it would have made that much difference because they had already found it in Shanghai." 

Hunt, who is writing a book exploring uranium trade routes of the 1940s, says she does not rule out the possibility that the uranium wound up in one of the bombs that landed on Nagasaki or Hiroshima but doubts that could have happened because of the time that would have been required to move the material through the very complex atomic manufacturing process. 

"If it did not get into the August bombs it was certainly used in the subsequent bombs," Hunt said in an interview last week. 'There is no question that it was used and put into subsequent devices that we continued to use for testing, possibly at the Bikini Atoll or in Nevada." 

Hunt's interest in U-234 was piqued by a number of still unanswered questions in addition to the mystery of the missing uranium: *How did the uranium on U-234 escape the uranium investigative activity of U.S. Gen. Leslie Groves' "Alsos" teams which probed uranium movements in Europe and Asia during World War II? 

*What part of the German military establishment had the knowledge, power and adminisirative clout to completely refit a submarine (from minelayer to giant underwater cargo vessel) and fill it with uranium and advanced weapons technology? 

*The uranium would have come from the Belgian Congo, [#SEE Source of Uranium? link at end of article] Hunt believes. But by what paths did the uranium move from there to the sub which was carrying it when it slid into the Baltic Sea on March 25, 1945? 

*What was the connection, if any, between the high-ranking Luftwaffe Gen. Ulrich Kessler on board U-234, and the uranium oxide cargo? When he told U.S. interrogators he had planned all along to leave the ship in Argentina, was it also his plan to take the uranium ashore with him and use it as a bargaining chip with the Argentinians? Or was he unaware of the uranium? 

*Her main question was, and still is, how did U.S. authorities manage to keep the uranium a secret for so many years?

Fate of Uranium... 
Source of Uranium? 

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