Uranium

Tom Zoellner

4 ideas

1. Shinkolobwe ore stockpiled on Staten Island

   Edgar Sengier, head of the Belgian mining company Union Minière, feared the Nazis would seize uranium from Congo's Shinkolobwe mine, so in 1940 he shipped roughly 1,200 tons of high-grade ore to a warehouse on Staten Island. In 1942 the Manhattan Project bought it, and much of the uranium in the Hiroshima bomb came from this Congolese ore. The Congolese miners who dug it went uncredited and largely unprotected, and the mine was later officially sealed but kept being worked by informal diggers.

2. Enrichment, not ore, is the real bottleneck

   Uranium is common in the Earth's crust, but natural uranium is only about 0.7 percent fissile U-235. So proliferation control centers on enrichment capacity and the know-how behind it, such as the A.Q. Khan network. Controlling mines is not the chokepoint.

3. Dual-use ambiguity of the same centrifuge

   A state can therefore build a legitimate civilian program that also carries latent weapons capability. This lets Iran and others claim peaceful intent while keeping the option of a bomb, and it makes intent, not hardware, the unverifiable variable.

4. Supply chains hide their human costs

   Following uranium back from the bomb or the reactor to the ground shows where the harm lands. It falls on the least powerful points in the chain, such as Congolese diggers and the Navajo miners of the Colorado Plateau, who got lung cancer from radon exposure the government knew about. Tracing a strategic material from its origin shows that its geopolitical value and its health burdens fall on entirely different people.

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