Science: Stockholm Project

Sweden’s atomic physicists were going about their business as if The Bomb had never poisoned their science. No Swedish G-men breathed down their necks. No military censors enforced silence. Uranium deposits were under Government control, but the Government, apparently, did not intend to keep them out of the hands of free-researching scientists.

Sweden’s atomic program, modest compared to the great powers’, included two large cyclotrons. Both would be built with private capital, including funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. Both would be built in underground laboratories.

Cyclotrons were not all. Sweden was obviously planning to build a uranium-plutonium pile, for Parliament had been asked to appropriate $1 million for high-purity graphite, heavy water and other pile materials. No uranium had been mined as yet, but fairly large deposits had been found in central Sweden. They were low grade, containing less than half a pound of uranium per ton of ore. Swedish uranium would be expensive, but cost might be no barrier if richer deposits in luckier countries were kept away from the open market.

Some Swedes dreamed of organizing an atomic cooperative among the Scandinavian countries. Sweden had uranium. Norway had heavy water and abundant electric energy. Denmark had Nobel Prizewinner Nils Bohr, one of the greatest living atom experts. Bohr had worked with the Manhattan Project, and no doubt knew many of its secrets. Swedish scientists stated emphatically that they were not interested in atomic bombs. Besides advancing pure science, they were aiming at industrial, technical, and medical uses of atomic energy.

U.S. nuclear physicists heard wistfully about their untrammelled Swedish colleagues. Sweden, they mused last week, might be a fine place to work. Some of them thought that refugee scientists from Axis countries, who played so important a part in the Manhattan Project, might move on to Sweden in search of professional freedom. If they did, the little Scandinavian country might become an important factor in the world’s atomic affairs.