Z.A.B. Zeman uncovers a fateful link between Czechoslovakia’s brief monopoly of uranium in Europe and the country’s subordination to the USSR. The great uranium rush started in 1943 and lasted for about seven years. Unlike the gold rushes of the past, uranium did not promise untold riches to individuals but instead unlimited power to the state: the atom bomb was the ‘absolute weapon’. As long as physicists and deposit geologists assumed that uranium was a scarce raw material, therefore, the great powers were desperate to secure it.