The Case of The Radioactive Toothpaste

In the late 1943, while the Manhattan project was underway, a team of spies were sent to Europe to gather information about how the Nazis were faring in the development of nuclear technology. Members of the “Alsos mission”, as it was called, soon learned that a German chemical company named Auergesellschaft had been shipping massive supplies of thorium to Germany. The news scared the Allies because it indicated that the German atomic research was further advanced than previously thought, as thorium can be used in an atomic-bomb project only when that project was well into the advanced stage.