Now all the evidence at hand, as already pointed out, indicates that, instead of building three different types of plants for producing A-bomb materials, Russia is concentrating entirely on plutonium. Hence, if we assume that she built a plutonium plant equal in output to the total capacity of our wartime uranium and plutonium plants, and further assuming that her methods for producing plutonium are as efficient as ours, the best she could do at present would be at the rate of six plutonium bombs a year. At this rate she would have about eighteen by the middle of 1952. This would be a sizable stockpile for a nation in sole possession of such a weapon. But would any nation with such a stockpile dare challenge a nation with a stockpile many times bigger, consisting of bombs many times more powerful, and possessing a few hydrogen bombs to boot? Russia will, no doubt, improve her production methods. But to improve them to the extent of producing, let us say, two bombs per month, she would have to step up her production by four hundred per cent. It is doubtful if such a step-up could be achieved in less than three years. Then there are other factors to be considered that greatly balance the scales in our favor. To produce plutonium bombs requires tremendous quantities of uranium, something that cannot be conjured up by just dialectic materialism. It so happens that we have access to the only two rich uranium deposits known in the world: the Belgian Congo, and the Great Bear Lake area in Canada. There were no known rich uranium deposits in Russia proper or in the territories of her satellites, with the possible exception of Czechoslovakia. We know this from the fact that she never competed for the world markets for radium, extracted economically only from rich uranium ores, which sold before the war at $25,000 per gram, or at the rate of nearly $12,000,000 a pound. The best evidence, however, that she does not have at her command rich uranium deposits either in Russia or elsewhere is her ruthless exploitation, at the cost of thousands of human lives, of the depleted uranium mines in the mountains of Saxony, which had long been abandoned by their German owners. The only other known source of pitchblende (the mineral richest in uranium) under Russian control is Joachimsthal (Jachymov) in Bohemia, from which came the first radium sample isolated by Mme Curie about fifty years ago. This mine, too, has been largely depleted, though much of its uranium may possibly be recoverable from the dump-heaps, if they have not in the meantime been disposed of.