# Shinkolobwe and the Manhattan Project The uranium in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima came, for the most part, out of a hole in the ground in Katanga — and the men who dug it were never told what it was, never compensated, and their country received nothing from the nuclear age it made possible. ## The ore The deposit about 20 km west of Likasi was identified in 1915 by Robert Rich Sharp, a geologist working for [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]]. It has been described as the most economical uranium ore in the world: uraninite in centimetre-scale cubes, assaying up to **65% U₃O₈** against roughly **0.02%** for Canadian and Colorado Plateau ore. That is a difference of more than three orders of magnitude, and it is why Shinkolobwe was strategically irreplaceable rather than merely useful. For two decades it was worked for **radium**, not uranium — UMHK built a refinery at Olen in Belgium in 1922 and held a near-monopoly of the world radium market by 1926. Uranium was the by-product nobody wanted. Radium demand collapsed in the 1930s and the mine was allowed to flood. ## Sengier's decision In May 1939 Sir Henry Tizard warned [[Edgar Sengier]], then a director of UMHK and Société Générale, that uranium contained "something which may mean a catastrophe to your country and mine if this material were to fall into the hands of a possible enemy," and asked him not to sell it elsewhere. French scientists in Joliot-Curie's circle approached him in the same period. In September 1940, with Belgium under German occupation, Sengier had roughly **1,200 tons** of the stockpile shipped secretly to New York aboard vessels of UMHK's American commercial arm, and stored in a three-storey warehouse on Staten Island near the Bayonne Bridge. It sat there for more than two years while the American programme searched for ore. ## The deal Lt. Col. Kenneth Nichols of the Manhattan Engineer District learned of it in autumn 1942 — reportedly when Sengier applied for a licence to ship material to Canada — and went to Sengier's office at 25 Broadway. Sengier's reply is one of the most quoted lines in Manhattan Project history: > [!quote] Edgar Sengier to Col. Kenneth Nichols, September 1942 > "You can have the ore now. It is in New York, a thousand tons of it." The September 1942 agreement transferred the Staten Island stockpile to the US Army and set up shipments of roughly 400 tons of uranium oxide a month from the Congo. A further ~3,000 tons remaining at the mine was secured; Shinkolobwe was dewatered and reopened with US Army engineering support. In 1944 alone Gen. Leslie Groves' Combined Development Trust bought more than 3.4 million pounds of uranium from the Belgian Congo. Two of the forty Congo–US shipments were torpedoed and lost to U-boats. Nichols' own verdict: *"without Sengier's foresight… we simply would not have had the amounts of uranium needed."* In 1946 Groves gave Sengier the Medal for Merit — the first non-American civilian to receive it. > [!warning] On the "two-thirds" figure > The National Park Service and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies both put the Congolese share at roughly **two-thirds** of Manhattan Project uranium, and popular accounts range from 60% to over 80%. "Roughly two-thirds of the ore procured" is defensible. The stronger claim — two-thirds of the fissile material in the weapons — is harder to substantiate and should be avoided. ## What happened to the mine Union Minière sealed the shafts with concrete around independence in 1960. From about 2000 illegal artisanal mining took hold, thousands of *creuseurs* digging copper and cobalt — and incidentally uranium-bearing rock — with no radiological protection of any kind. A presidential decree of 28 January 2004 formally closed the site on national-security grounds. Roughly 15,000 people from nearby villages were evacuated in an operation residents describe as brutal, with homes burned and no compensation. In July 2004 a shaft collapse killed eight and injured thirteen, prompting a UN assessment mission that November. A 2006 sanctions-committee report found smuggling of radioactive material "far more frequent than previously assumed," including seizures of uranium ore near Kinshasa. Former miners report respiratory disease and suspected heavy-metal and radiation injury. Birth defects are documented in the surrounding communities. There has been no remediation and no compensation. ## The point Shinkolobwe is where this cluster's whole argument becomes unarguable. The most consequential mineral extraction in human history happened in the Congo, was decided by a Belgian executive and an American colonel in a Manhattan office, and produced for the Congolese exactly nothing — not payment, not information, not cleanup. Every subsequent chapter, down to the 2025 agreements in Washington, is a variation on that arrangement. ## See also [[Edgar Sengier]] · [[Union Minière du Haut-Katanga]] · [[Belgian Congo]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]] · [[Congolese History Hub]]