Four-Gram Jitters

Handsome, white-haired William Bradford Huie is a free-lance writer whose most sensational stories sometimes blow up in his editors' faces. In 1941, Huie attacked the University 'of Alabama (his alma mater) in a Collier's expose of subsidized football. After some Rebel yells, the magazine backtracked on Huie's story. A World War II Navy officer, Huie later ghostwrote an attack on the "obsolete" Navy for an Air Force general; it was so violent that the general disowned it, and the book (The Case Against the Admirals) came out over Huie's byline. Boiled down, his case for airpower got the Reader's Digest into boiling water with the Navy.

A month ago, 38-year-old Bradford Huie stumbled across what looked to him like a red-hot newspaper story on the Atomic Energy Commission. He sold it to the New York Daily News, which has lately been after the scalp of AEC Chairman David Lilienthal. The News assigned Reporter Jerry Greene of its Washington staff to check Huie's tip. Last week, in five lines of Page One scareheads and five columns inside, the News broke the Huie-Greene scoop: ATOM BOMB URANIUM VANISHES; SECRET MATERIAL LOST OR STOLEN AT CHICAGO PLANT.

The story was that "three-quarters of a pound of Uranium 235 compound, explosive heart of the atom bomb . . . has vanished from the Chicago laboratories of the Atomic Energy Commission. Counter-intelligence officers . . . believe that the uranium is in Russian hands. The loss--or mare probable theft--is considered the greatest threat to national security ever to be discovered in peacetime. There is a sufficient amount [for] experiments . . . leading to the perfection of a detonating mechanism . . ."

32 Lost. The Washington Times-Herald, Oave the Daily News story the same kind of prominent play. But their kissing cousin, the Chicago Tribune, refused to print the story--or even transmit it over its eased wires--for security reasons.

When reporters descended on AEC to check the News story, AEC at first refused to comment because it was "highly classified information." Then Deputy General Manager Carleton Shugg admitted that there was one pinch of truth in the News story: some U-235 was missing. But that was all, according to AEC, that was true.

AEC said that 32 grams of U-235--about one ounce--had been missed in a February inventory at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. The laboratory immediately had begun the tedious process of analyzing all experimental wastes, in which valuable materials frequently turn up. A month later AEC notified the FBI, which found "no espionage involved in this case."

28 Found. By last week, 28 grams of U-235 had been recovered, and there was still unexamined waste. The remaining four grams were "not believed to have been stolen or lost." In any case, AEC did not think the Russians would be interested in such a small amount; they have long been able to make larger amounts by ordinary laboratory methods. Sighed Chairman Lilienthal, who was having other troubles last week (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) not so easy to explain away: "A case of four-gram jitters." But this week Senator Brien McMahon's Joint Atomic Energy Committee began an investigation.

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