"In the heat of the Second World War, Allied intelligence services were freaked out by the discovery that Auergesellschaft, a German military contractor, had confiscated a huge stockpile of thorium from a company in occupied Paris and taken it back to Germany. Nuclear scientists working on the Allied bomb realized that if the Germans had figured out they needed thorium, they must be pretty far along in their own nuclear program. Actually the Germans had made pathetically little progress on the bomb. No, Auergesellschaft just had a secret plan to launch a brand of thoriated toothpaste after the war—they had hoped it would become as popular as radium toothpaste and wanted to be sure they had plenty of thorium on hand."