T his all began for me at a mesa in Utah called Temple Mountain, so named because its high-pitched

walls and jagged spires had reminded early Mormon settlers of a house of worship. I had driven into the wide
canyon at its base, pitched a tent among some junipers, and eaten a can of chili while sitting on a rock and
watching the day’s last sunlight creeping upward on the salmon- colored walls to the east. A set of caves,
their mouths agape, dotted the face of the cliff.
Pyramid-shaped mounds of rock and talus were piled under them, and
rotten wooden boards lay half drowned in this debris.
I looked closer and saw that the caves were square, and one appeared
to be propped with beams. These weren’t caves at all. They were mine
entrances.
It now made sense. The valley floor had that ragged and hard-used
look common to many other pieces of wilderness in the American West
that had been rich in gold or silver in the nineteenth century. A braiding
of trails was etched into the dirt, and the slabs of an abandoned stone cabin
and shattered lengths of metal pipe were down there, too, now almost
obscured in the dusk. The place had been devoured quickly and then spat
out, with a midden of antique garbage left behind.
What kind of ore had been carted away from here? Curiosity got the
better of me, and I wandered over to a spot down the trail where three
other people had also set up camp. They were recent college graduates
from Salt Lake City on a spring camping trip. After offering me a beer
from their cooler, they told me the holes on the cliff were of much more recent origin than I
had thought. Uranium mines had been drilled in southern Utah after World War II, and the
mineral had gone into nuclear weapons. This was common knowledge around southern Utah.
Uranium. The name seemed magical, and vaguely unsettling. I remembered the boxy
periodic table of the elements, where uranium was signified by the letter U. It was fairly high
up the scale, meaning there were a lot of small particles called protons clustered in its
nucleus. So it was heavy. It was also used to generate nuclear power. I remembered that
much from high school science. But it had never quite registered with me that a mineral lying
in the crust of the earth—just a special kind of dirt, really—was the home of one of the most
violent forces under human control. A paradox there: from dust to dust. The earth came
seeded with the means of its own destruction, a geologic original sin.
There was something personal here, too. I had grown up in the 1980s in Tucson, Arizona, a
city ringed with Titan II missiles. One of those warheads was lodged in a concrete silo and
surrounded by a square of barbed wire in the desert about twenty miles north of my high
school. It was nearly five hundred times as powerful as the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Our
city was supposed to have been number seven on the Soviet target list, behind Washington,
D.C.; the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska; and several other missile
fields in the Great Plains. I lived through my adolescence with the understanding that an
irreconcilable crisis with Moscow would mean my family and I would be vaporized in white
light, and there might be less than ten minutes’ warning to say good-bye (the brief window of
foreknowledge seemed more terrible than the vaporizing). Like most every other American of
that day, I subsumed this possibility and went about my business. There could be no other
choice; to dwell on the idea for very long was like looking at the sun.
And now, here I was in a spot that had given up the mineral that had haunted the world
for more than half a century. The mouths in the canyon walls at Temple Mountain looked as
prosaic as they would have at any other mining operation. They also happened to be in the
midst of some of the most gorgeous American landscape I know: the dry and crenulated
Colorado Plateau, which spreads across portions of four states in a pinkish-red maze of
canyons, sagebrush plains, and crumbling pinnacles that, in places, looks like a Martian vista.
This, too, was an intriguing paradox: radioactive treasure in a phantasm landscape. The
desert had birthed an awful power.
After my trip, I plunged into the library and wrote an article for a history magazine about
the uranium rush of the 1950s, when the government paid out bonuses to ordinary
prospectors to comb the deserts for the basic fuel of the nuclear arms race. But my
fascination with uranium did not end, even years after that night I slept under the cliff ruins.
In the present decade, as the United States has gone to war in Iraq on the premise of keeping
uranium out of the wrong hands—and as tensions mount in Iran over that nation’s plan to
enrich the fatal ore—I realized that I still knew almost nothing about this one entry in the
periodic table that had so drastically reordered the global hierarchy after World War II and
continued to amplify some of the darker pulls of humanity: greed, vanity, xenophobia,
arrogance, and a certain suicidal glee.
I had to relearn some basic matters of science, long forgotten since college. I knew that
the nuclear trick comes from the “splitting” of an atom and the consequent release of energy.
But why not copper or oxygen or coffee grounds or orange peels or anything else? Why does
this feat require a rare version of uranium, known as U-235, that must be distilled, or
“enriched,” from raw uranium?
I started reading again about the infinitesimally small particles called neutrons and
protons packed at the center, or nucleus, of atoms, and the negatively charged particles
called electrons that whiz around the nucleus like bees around a hive. Puncture that nucleus,
and the electrical energy that bound it together would flash outward in a killing wave. U-235
is uniquely vulnerable to this kind of injury, and I understood this in concept but could not
really visualize it until I came across a line written by the physicist Otto Frisch. He described
this particular nucleus as a “wobbling, unstable drop ready to divide itself at the slightest
provocation.” That image finally brought it home: the basic principle of the atomic bomb.
A uranium atom is simply built too large. It is the heaviest element that occurs in nature,
with ninety-two protons jammed into its nucleus. This approaches a boundary of physical
tolerance. The heart of uranium,its nucleus, is an aching knot held together with electrical
coils that are as fragile as sewing thread—more fragile than in any other atom that occurs in
nature. Just the pinprick of an invading neutron can rip the whole package apart with hideous
force. The subatomic innards of U-235 spray outward like the shards of a grenade; these
fragments burst the skins of neighboring uranium nuclei, and the effect blossoms
exponentially, shattering a trillion trillion atoms within the space of one orgiastic second. A
single atom of uranium is strong enough to twitch a grain of sand. A sphere of it the size of a
grapefruit can eliminate a city.
There are other dangers. A uranium atom is so overloaded that it has begun to cast off
pieces of itself, as a deluded man might tear off his clothes. In a frenzy to achieve a state of
rest, it slings off a missile of two protons and two neutrons at a velocity fast enough to whip
around the circumference of the earth in roughly two seconds. This is the simplest form of
radioactivity, deadly in high doses. These bullets can tear through living tissue and poke holes
in healthy cell tissue, making the tissue vulnerable to genetic errors and cancer.
Losing its center piece by piece, uranium changes shape as it loses its protons—it becomes
radium and then radon and then polonium—a lycanthropic cascade that involves thirteen
heavy metals before the stuff finally comes to permanent rest as lead. More than 4.5 billion
years must pass before half of any given sample decays. Seething anger is locked inside
uranium, but the ore is stable and can be picked up and carried around safely as long as its
dust is not inhaled. “Hell, I’d shovel some of it into my pillow and sleep on it at night” is a
common saying among miners