How scientists traced a uranium cube to Nazi Germany’s nuclear reactor program
A radioactive relic from World War II wound up in the hands of physicist Timothy Koeth
The mysterious cube arrived in the summer of 2013. Physicist Timothy Koeth had agreed to go to a parking lot for an unspecified delivery. Inside a blue cloth sack, swathed in paper towels, he found a small chunk of uranium.
It was about 5 centimeters across, with “a white piece of paper wrapped around it, like a ransom note on a stone,” Koeth says. On the paper was a message: “Taken from the reactor that Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.”
Koeth, a collector of nuclear memorabilia, was enthralled. “I just immediately knew what this thing was,” he says. During World War II, German scientists had attempted to build a nuclear reactor, until their uranium cubes — more than 600 of them — were confiscated by Allied forces and shipped to the United States.
Koeth, of the University of Maryland in College Park, thought his cube could be from that cache but wanted to confirm the hunch. In the process, he and University of Maryland graduate student Miriam Hiebert came to a striking conclusion, reported May 1 in Physics Today: Contrary to conventional wisdom, German scientists could have created a nuclear reactor during the war, but competition between teams stymied the effort.