Uranium Matters: Central European Uranium in International Politics, 1900-1960 (review)

Most analyses of the Sovietization of Central Europe have devoted little attention to the fact that Czechoslovakia and the Soviet occupation zone in Germany possessed Europe's largest deposits of uranium ore. Zbynek Zeman and Rainer Karsch fill the void in a fascinating account of how the "uranium factor" affected the way the two countries were incorporated into the emerging Soviet bloc and how the ruthless excavation of uranium there affected their societies and economies.

As Zeman and Karlsch explain, uranium played almost no role in the last stages of the Second World War when victorious armies occupied large swaths of Central Europe. Not even Winston Churchill's insistence that the U.S. Army move beyond the lines agreed at Yalta was motivated by any wish to control Europe's largest deposits of uranium ore, of which the Western leaders were entirely ignorant. For a few months in 1945, U.S. forces occupied but then vacated territory that for years afterward provided almost all the fissile material needed to produce Soviet nuclear warheads, including the first bomb tested in August 1949. An intriguing question arises whether history might have taken a different course if the wartime Allies had known about the uranium deposits. The U.S. decision to bomb the Nazi nuclear processing facility in Auer near Oranienburg shortly before the end of the war was taken precisely in order to prevent it from falling into Soviet hands.

Soviet leaders quickly realized the importance of the region for the USSR's nuclear competition with theWest after Soviet forces had ferreted out the minerals in the immediate aftermath of the war. The uranium riches thus served to tighten Soviet control in the region and made Czechoslovakia's escape from Iosif Stalin's iron grip all but impossible. In the early 1950s, Soviet-bloc war plans routinely assumed that the goal of a putative Western attack would be to gain control of the uranium deposits.

The uranium factor in the Sovietization of Czechoslovakia was not only largely ignored by scholars but also conveniently forgotten by non-Communist politicians who emigrated after the Communist takeover in 1948. The story of the 1945 Czechoslovak-Soviet treaty giving the Soviet Union a monopoly over Czechoslovak uranium was a sort of guilty secret because all the leading political elites, regardless of political affiliation, readily participated in offering the precious ore to Stalin on a silver platter even before the rest of the country fell into his lap. Pushed by the pro-Soviet prime minister Zdenèk Fierlinger, President Edvard Beneš, after briefly hesitating, acquiesced in a treaty that gave Moscow exclusive access to the country's uranium. In exchange Prague received a promise of Soviet support for Czechoslovak territorial claims vis-à-vis Poland and Austria and a vague commitment to develop the Czechoslovak mining industry in western Slovakia. Negotiated in utmost secrecy by Fierlinger, the draft was submitted to the government for approval in November 1945. The text elicited little discussion other than some consideration of the economic aspects of the deal.

Possibly having second thoughts, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who had envisaged Czechoslovakia as a bridge between the East and West, clumsily attempted to rectify the fait accompli. A few months after the treaty was signed, he assured the audience at the London conference of the United Nations that the ore excavated in Czechoslovakia would never be used for war purposes. To the bewilderment of the Fierlinger government, Masaryk subsequently proposed international inspections of the mines, which were in fact heavily guarded by Soviet troops. The unanimous reaction of the government, including non-Communist ministers, was sincere indignation. In a panicked reaction to this rebuttal, Masaryk quickly abandoned his solitary position.

After the Communist takeover, the uranium industry became a microcosm of the Soviet system with its forced labor, disregard for human welfare and freedom, and depredation of the environment. However, significant differences existed in the way East Germany and Czechoslovakia...