Uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine at Katanga in southern Congo was far richer than any other source in the world – producing uranium oxide whose quality assayed as high as 75 per cent (compared to 0.02 per cent from ores in the United States and Canada). So important was Shinkolobwe to the US nuclear programme, and consequently to the Cold War, that it was deemed to be essential to US national security. Congo as a whole ‘offers natural resources of extreme importance to our domestic economy’, noted the officials and engineers who worked on the Manhattan Project; they went to great lengths to
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