Chapter 10 BLACK GOLD AND YELLOW CAKE 195 Engineers in Denver, Utah’s James C. Allen presented a paper entitled “Latest Developments in Oil Shale Mining Equipment,” which illustrated a long-standing company principle: techniques learned in one industry could often solve related problems found in another. Then, the oil crisis of the 1970s refocused the company’s attention on petroleum as the United States sought to develop domestic supplies. In November 1974, Utah announced the acquisition of the Ladd Petroleum Corporation, a Denver-based company, in existence since 1968, which produced 9.7 billion cubic feet of gas and 705,000 barrels of crude oil shortly before Utah’s acquisition. Ladd owned producing oil and gas properties in fourteen states and two Canadian provinces. To facilitate the acquisition, the oil company’s president, J. B. Ladd, joined the board as a director of Utah International. Shortly after the addition of Ladd Petroleum, Utah announced a merger with Clarcan Petroleum Corporation, which had explored, developed, and operated oil and gas properties in the United States and Canada. In the final analysis, Utah executives went far beyond governmental requirements and the demands of being a good corporate citizen in all of its coal and oil enterprises, and particularly at Navajo, where profound benefits came to the native people because of the company’s activity among them. Navajo coal and a smaller involvement in the oil business, however, represented only a part of Utah’s legacy in the energy-producing industry. World events and advancing technology would bring the firm into the middle of a new energy extraction industry that had the potential to change virtually everything. a In the late 1930s, as the Earth teetered on the brink of global war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the advice of Albert Einstein and commissioned a group of scientists under J. Robert Oppenheimer to attempt to create a powerful new weapon through nuclear fission. The Danish physicist Neils Bohr had argued for the use of the unstable isotope uranium-235, because it could sustain a chain reaction. While plutonium-239 also proved successful in the creation of the Manhattan Project’s atomic bombs, it was uranium ore that drove the gold rush of the modern age as the nuclear arms