A Dangerous Cargo Surfaces

Three weeks after it collided with a West German ferry, the French container ship Mont Louis still lay on its side last week in 45 ft. of water, eleven miles from the Belgian coast. Gale-force winds and 15-ft. swells had broken it in two, raising fears that 30 steel containers filled with uranium hexafluoride, raw material from which nuclear fuel is made, might be swept out of the ship's holds into the sea. Then the bad weather broke, salvage operations resumed, and by midweek the first of the containers, originally destined for the Soviet Union, was winched to the surface.

The recovery finally put to rest wild rumors about the nature of the cargo. A Belgian senator had declared that the Mont Louis had been carrying, among other items, arms for the Soviet Union, an allegation that was curtly dismissed by the Belgian government. By week's end 13 of the containers of uranium were aboard a salvage barge, and crews from Belgium and England were able to mop up a three-mile-long fuel-oil slick.