Way back in 1999, I did a series of posts on soc.history.what-if on the consequences of a successful assassination of FDR (instead of the near-miss of OTL).
Seeing the recent thread on the same topic here inspired me to dig up one of those old posts. I hope nobody minds.
The inspiration for this post: it occurred to me that in a world without FDR, Albert Einstein's 1939 letter to the President either would not be written, or would be discarded without response. In which case...
Big Bill is a historical character, BTW.
* * * * *
Big Bill Knudsen is thinking about uranium.
He has a little ingot of the stuff in his pocket. It's about the size of a candy bar, a Hershey perhaps, and quite startlingly heavy. It may be the largest piece of pure uranium on the planet right now. Nobody's ever bothered to refine pure uranium in quantities larger than a few grams before, after all. What would be the point?
What bothers him is that it might not be the largest piece of pure uranium in existence just now.
Knudsen isn't normally a man to drink alone, but tonight he has a bottle of akvavit and a bucket of ice, and he's made a fair dent in both of them. And bits and pieces of conversations from the Cornwall Conference -- it has already capitalized itself in his mind -- are rattling around in his mind like the pieces of ice in his glass.
"...chain reaction..."
This is what Bill Knudsen knew about uranium up until three months ago. Uranium is a heavy metal, rare, but with limited commercial value. It is about half again as dense as lead. It is found in an ore called pitchblende.
"..two isotopes, of which one..."
Uranium is somewhat radio-active. It forms several oxides, which have some use as pigments in paints, and for coloring ceramics. In nature it is typically found in close association with radium and vanadium: vanadium because it is chemically similar, and radium because it is formed by the radio-active decay of uranium.
(Until yesterday, Knudsen thought that this last fact was the most interesting thing about uranium. It made him think of his childhood, sixty years ago in Jutland, and Great-mother telling stories by the peat fire. There was the boy who listened to a whispering voice and dug beneath the roots of an oak tree. The boy found a salve that could heal all wounds, a blade that would cut through stone, and a magic cloth that could turn iron into gold.
(Transmutation, that old chestnut of alchemists and fairy tales! But it really happened, slowly and silently, right there in the good earth. Knudsen found that neat.
(He now knows things about uranium that are much more interesting than that.)
"...sufficiently large amount that was sufficiently pure. We would call this amount the critical mass..."
Big Bill is staying at the Plaza tonight, in the Presidential Suite. A literal-minded man, he wonders briefly if any President has ever stayed there. Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps? Or Franklin; it's the sort of place the aristocratic "FDR" would have taken for granted. Perhaps Roosevelt stayed here when he was visiting Manhattan from Albany; perhaps he even came here after the election. Knudsen briefly imagines the man (vaguely remembered from newsreels) sitting at this very desk -- wasn't there something wrong with his legs? -- accepting congratulations, planning his version of the New Deal, picking his Cabinet.
"...Cabinet member, I can't offer any official assistance. But someone has to get these men together, Bill, and get some straight answers to these questions."
The voice is a baritone, the accent purest Hoosier. "The President, well, Bill, the President has a lot on his mind right now. But if there's even a chance that this thing could really..."
Knudsen walks to the window. On a clear day, he would have one of the world's great views, the Manhattan skyline in its glory. But it is raining in Manhattan tonight: cold November rain, with fog. Outside the window there's only rattling darkness.
Knudsen turns aside, swirling his drink. No son of Jutland will be bothered by a little cold rain, but he does not care to match gazes with the darkness tonight.
"...conventional explosive. We would measure it, not in tons, but in hundreds or thousands of tons of..."
He takes the uranium ingot from his pocket. It's pure enough that the radio-activity is a concern. If he kept it on his person long enough, it might give him a slight skin burn, or even make him somewhat sick. This, too, seems like magic, an invisible light that acts like slow poison. The surface of the ingot is grey, the metal a bit darker and duller than iron.
Knudsen is a man accustomed to having feelings about metals. He has an instinctive understanding of them: alloying, ductility, tensile strength, melting point. A few centuries ago he would have been a smith among smiths, forging swords for Denmark's kings. Born into the Industrial Age, he is a smith of a different sort: the greatest engineer in the service of General Motors, a company richer than the dreams of any Viking reaver. But still there is the instinctive sympathy, the ability to feel the possibilities in a piece of metal. Now Knudsen holds the ingot in his hand, and what he feels is a curious sort of abstract revulsion. He does not like this uranium.
"...we asked him not to publish. Unfortunately, I lacked any official position, and he rejected my recommendation." The voice is clipped, slightly nasal; the accent is indeterminate Eastern European. "Given it, any reasonably competent physicist could calculate..."
It occurs to him that he could open the window and drop the ingot out. He can see it clearly in his mind's eye: his hand opening, the ingot tumbling downwards through the rain, accelerating. His engineer's mind instantly calculates the speed and energy of impact -- seventeen floors, a hundred and eighty feet, thirty-three feet per second squared... Uranium metal is quite brittle; it would hit the sidewalk and shatter, rather like heavy glass or ceramic. Shards of dense, slightly radio-active metal would scatter over a city block, with secondary impacts leaving unsightly scars on the marble facing of the Plaza's facade.
Uranium is also a pyrophore. Big Bill pauses a moment, turning this over in his mind. So, the ingot wouldn's just shatter; it would strike a spark. A big one. Not an explosion, exactly. No, uranium is not an explosive -- not a chemical explosive, he corrects himself -- but still quite an impressive display. Despite the rain, he would probably see it from his window.
"...neutron capture..."
Of course he will not do any such thing. People might be walking by, huddled against the rain. People might be hurt. Knudsen puts the ingot on the writing table. He takes another sip of akvavit and, without thinking, he wipes his hand slowly on the leg of his pants.
Tomorrow, of course, the streets will be full. Tomorrow is Election Day. Knudsen has not missed an election since he swore loyalty to his adopted country, back in 1901; he has already voted, by absentee ballot, back in Michigan. He is a man who plans ahead, and he knew that he would be away this week. It won't make much difference, of course; with a favorite son in the race, there's not much question which way Detroit will vote.
Still, voting was not easy for Big Bill this year. Like most GM executives, he's a reflexive Republican. Democrats are the party of sit-down strikes, of confiscatory taxes, of taking the money of self-made men like himself and throwing it away on boondoggles and subsidies. In '36 he voted for Landon without hesitation. But this year, for the first time since 1912, Big Bill has quietly split his ticket.
"...the resources of a small country. Probably. Of course, given time..."
It's the war, of course. Hitler straddles Europe like a colossus, and what are they doing in Jutland tonight? He has family in the Old Country, Big Bill does, and he has watched the newsreels carefully.
Steel, steel everywhere: in the the treads of the tanks rolling through the Ardennes, in the guns of the victorious Wehrmacht, in the triumphant ring of the Fuhrer's voice. In the cold rain falling across Europe. In the shackles on his native land.
Big Bill knows steel. This new alloy is strong, and will require great strength to break.
He remembers stories of Polish uhlans charging tanks, their sabres bouncing absurdly off the cold metal of the armored hulls. Propaganda, someone else had said; a fairy tale, never happened. Perhaps not. But he feels the truth in the story, whatever the facts might be: steel, strong and heavy, not to be fought by simple flesh and blood.
Against the polished oak of the table the ingot gleams dully. Big Bill sits on the edge of the bed, frowning intently across the room.
"...no source of funding." The Hoosier voice again. "It's not something we can bring to Congress, Bill. Especially not in an election year. We can find a few dollars here and there, call it mineralogical research, but nothing like what these fellows are talking about."
"Well then, Mr. Secretary, I don't see what can be done!" His own voice, bass rumble, Detroit accent but Jutland still audible in the vowels if you listen for it. "I can purify as much uranium as you like. But this business of _separation_, well..."
In his mind's eye the ingot leaves his hand...
"...tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars? Sure, military spending has been picking up speed since June, but there's just no way we could ever..."
..falling through the rain, accelerating smoothly at thirty-three feet per second per second...
"There's nothing we can do, then?"
..accelerating towards impact. Brittle, it will shatter...
"There's nothing we can do, then?"
...sabres bouncing absurdly off the armored hulls...
"There's nothing we can do, then?"
...a salve that could heal all wounds, a sword that could cut through stone...
"There's nothing we can do, then?"
...pyrophore...
The rain closes in, and night and fog take Manhattan. Somewhere in the darkness, Big Bill Knudsen is thinking about uranium.
Doug M.