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Hiroshima's uranium came from Congo
Uranium and copper
A meeting of Belgians and Americans in Midtown Manhattan settled the terms for buying that uranium. The same corner of the Congo, from Lubumbashi to Kolwezi, had been mined for copper since colonial times, and about a quarter of the bullets used in World War I were copper from there.
Other minerals lay in that ground too, but they had no industrial value yet. The cobalt, nickel, and copper that go into batteries now come out of the same southeastern belt.
The resource curse
The pattern has a name, the resource curse. When treasure turns up somewhere, it attracts pirates who loot the place, and a land that is war-torn, colonized, or corrupt gives chaos room to run.
Why was Shinkolobwe's uranium so rich?
Shinkolobwe's deposit held pitchblende, a dense uranium oxide mineral, in unusually concentrated veins. Its ore ran to tens of percent uranium oxide in places. Most uranium mined today comes from ores that hold a fraction of a percent to a few percent. The richness meant a small tonnage of ore yielded a great deal of usable material.
How did the United States get Congolese uranium?
Edgar Sengier, a director of the Belgian mining company Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, shipped about 1,200 tons of uranium ore to New York in 1940. The ore was stored in a warehouse on Staten Island. In 1942 the Manhattan Project bought it, which gave the program a large supply at the start. Sengier had moved the ore out of Africa before the war could cut off access to it.
Why do resource-rich countries often stay poor?
Economists call the pattern the resource curse. One cause is Dutch disease, in which commodity exports raise a currency's value and make other industries uncompetitive. Another is that mineral revenue flows to a small group, which weakens the incentive to build broad institutions. A 1995 study by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner found that countries heavily dependent on natural resources grew more slowly than others.
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