The Duality of "Playing with Uranium"

As I continue to grieve Mr. Hahn I have begun to think about my own personal fascination with the element uranium. Regular blog readers will know that I have dubbed myself UraniumJ here on the blog. This is indirectly a result of Mr. Hahn's garden shed reactor. It is directly a result of Duran Duran's song "Playing with Uranium" which was inspired by Mr. Hahn and his garden shed reactor. This is my second favorite song by Duran Duran (my #1 favorite is and always will be "Ordinary World"). When I decided to get a Duran Duran tattoo, it was of a uranium symbol because of the song.

My tattoo.

For many years I thought the song was nothing more than a very clever metaphor dreamed up by Simon LeBon. It wasn't until fairly recently - within the past four years I would say - that I discovered the origins of the song were rooted in fact. When I was a Deep Fellow I wanted to use the song as an example of metaphor, so I began researching it and I found out that it wasn't a metaphor at all. This was when I first learned of David Hahn. I didn't give him or his story very much thought at the time. I was mostly disappointed by the fact that this great metaphor was in fact literal.

Still, the element Uranium remained fascinating. I had also begun collecting Vaseline glass, a subset of depression glass that was manufactured with uranium to produce a vibrant green color that glows under a black light. I thought about buying a sample of Uranium on Amazon - sealed in lead of course. I always picked locked number 92 at the gym because that was Uranium's atomic number. At the time, I thought all of this was just an homage to Duran Duran, but I think now that there was more to it than that.

My Jeanette cake plate. My pride and joy. (Source)

Like the god Shiva, uranium has a dualistic nature - it is the creator and the destroyer. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a god of the modern age, but maybe you could. Uranium - and any radioactive element for that matter has the ability to create vast amounts of energy for the greater good, as in nuclear power plants; energy that is mostly clean and safe with the capacity to power thousands, even millions of homes for infinitely longer than smog producing coal. With Taylor Wilson's plans for nuclear fission reactors we could possibly create clean nuclear energy from nuclear waste itself. This is the very definition of creation.

But Uranium, and all radioactive elements have the power to destroy - and destroy they do. Most if not all of the pioneers of nuclear research died horrible and gruesome deaths from radiation exposure. The Radium Girls, who painted watch faces with Radium paint were so irradiated when they died that 60 years later their graves still set Geiger counters off. The doctors who pioneered the use of X-rays lost limbs to cancers or died in the early days of the technology. And let's not forget about the accidents that can happen when creating nuclear energy, such as were experienced in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. All that creation does sometime come at a price.

 Then there was the Manhattan Project and everything that came after. It takes a grapefruit sized amount of Uranium 235 weighing 118 pounds to build a nuclear bomb. It only takes a golfball sized amount of Plutonium weighing 24 pounds (which is created from Uranium 238) to achieve the same thing. According to the United Nations, one nuclear bomb exploded in one major city could kill hundreds of thousands of people. We know this to be true as we are the only nation on the planet to have used an atomic bomb against another nation. With Uranium and the advent of The Bomb, we are become Death.

"Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." J. Robert Oppenheimer (Source)

And so perhaps, this is the fascination of "Playing with Uranium" for me - of the song, and the element itself. There is a duality to it, a creation aspect and the possibility for destruction. With the song, the metaphor still exists and there is the chance that when one is "Playing with Uranium" one might "reinvent the human race" and create something wonderful - a relationship perhaps? Or "it" could "blow up in [one's] face" leaving one to pick up the pieces of the broken relationship "on the other side." It works on two levels.

Then, of course, there remains the fact that the song is in fact about David Hahn, whom I am still mourning and whom I am planning on writing a book based on. He too embodies this dualism. He was so enraptured by the good that atomic energy could do for the world that he was blind to the harm it could do to him, his environment, his relationships, and potentially his entire community. He was himself the god of creation and destruction, and I think if I am to write anything poignant, this must be my theme. I only hope that I am able to do him justice and honor his memory in what I create. We will all do well to remember that this is a character inspired by David Hahn. This character is not actaully David Hahn. I only wish that he were here to give final approval of whatever I come up with.

Shiva dances in the flames to kill the demon and recreate the world. (Source)