Congo’s mineral resources are found in two broad geographical curves, arcs of mineral-rich surface-level rock that converge on the city of Lubumbashi. This region, known as the Copperbelt, has been mined for more than a century for minerals like copper, cobalt, nickel, gold, and uranium. Some of those deposits are among the richest of their kind in the world, and the workers in those mines are among the most exploited on the planet. Conditions in the mining regions have changed little in the century since the opening of the Shinkolobwe mine, whose highly concentrated uranium ore supercharged both the U.S. and German military projects to develop atomic weapons during World War II.
For the 15 years after its use in the bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of the uranium mined for the Manhattan Project’s subsequent bomb-building efforts came out of the Shinkolobwe mine, sited at the edge of the arc of Congo’s richest metal-bearing soils. Shinkolobwe’s intensely powerful ore was essential to the rapid design, development, and detonation of the world’s first atomic weapons, and the construction of the thousands that followed.
Shinkolobwe was opened in 1921 by the Belgian colony’s minerals consortium, Union Minière. Although many of the Katanga region’s mines were focused on veins of copper-bearing malachite, Shinkolobwe was mined for decades for its radium, which was used in cancer treatments and to make watch dials glow in the dark. The masses of bright-yellow uranium ore that came up along with the radium were initially discarded as waste rock: There were scant commercial usages for uranium until the war began.