Today, many people in the nuclear and intelligence communities are still convinced that a diversion occurred.
The Foreign Policy piece details a great deal of circumstantial evidence suggesting the involvement of NUMEC founder Zalman Shapiro in a diversion of his company's enriched uranium to Israel, but concludes that even those who believe there was a diversion concede that there is no proof:
Today, some people in Apollo think that at least a portion of the uranium might be buried in Parks, contaminating the earth and, ultimately, human beings. Others, such as the late Glenn Seaborg, the AEC’s chairman in the 1960s-who had previously helped discover plutonium and made key contributions to the Manhattan Project-have suggested that the sloppy accounting and government regulations of the mid-20th century meant that keeping track of losses in America’s newborn nuclear industry was well near impossible. NUMEC’s founder, Zalman Shapiro, an accomplished American chemist, addressed the concern in 1978, telling Arizona Congressman Morris Udall that the uranium simply escaped through the facility’s air ducts, cement, and wastewater. " … Such enriched material has been sold on an official basis to Israel, and this could be the source of the clandestine sample," wrote Seaborg, who devoted an entire chapter to Shapiro's innocence in his book "Adventures in the Atomic Age."įoreign Policy's Johnson also noted Seaborg's dismissal of the diversion theory, noting that loose governmental regulations at the time meant that keeping accurate tabs on uranium was an impossible task. Seaborg wrote that two government investigators, sent to interview him on June 21, 1978, told him enriched uranium, identified as coming from one of NUMEC's suppliers, was found in Israel. One of the few government documents referencing enriched uranium from the United States found in Israel was a diary entry from Glenn Seaborg, a Nobel Prize winner and a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, which controlled the use of atomic energy for commercial and military use in the 1960s. The Valley News-Dispatch (Tarentum, Pa.) reported J("Reports of missing uranium dogged NUMEC owner Zalman Shapiro for life"): Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg, the co-discoverer of plutonium and all transuranium elements through element 102 and a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, also firmly rejected the theory.
He is not the only well-informed scientist who doubts that NUMEC's uranium was diverted to Israel. Johnson quotes Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists: "It is one of the most interesting and important Cold War mysteries out there." Fifty years after investigations began-they have involved, at various times, the AEC and its successors, Congress, the FBI, the CIA, and other government agencies-NUMEC remains one of the most confounding puzzles of the nuclear era.
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