Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

by Siddharth Kara

uranium on April 11, 1915. The deposits had an average concentration of 65 percent U308 (triuranium octoxide), making it the highest-grade source of uranium in the world at the time. UMHK promptly built a uranium mine called Shinkolobwe southwest of Likasi. The global market for uranium in the 1920s was limited to use in pigments for ceramics, not unlike cobalt, so the mine was not nearly as profitable as the nearby copper mines and was ultimately closed in 1937. Soon after, the Manhattan Project identified Shinkolobwe as the ideal source for the high-grade uranium required to build an atomic bomb. On September 18, 1942, at an office in Midtown Manhattan, the owners of UMHK agreed to sell uranium from Shinkolobwe to the U.S. Army for around one dollar per pound. Shinkolobwe provided roughly 75 percent of the uranium that was used for the bombs dropped from the Enola Gay on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.1