Each episode of Naked City, a late 1950s/early 1960s police procedural television series, ended with a voice over saying: "There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." Last month’s debut of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer was not only a box office blockbuster, it also provided a jumping off point for fact checkers and researchers to delve deeper into the building of the atomic bomb. Even a movie that intends to be historically accurate can omit significant details. While there might not be eight million stories in this Naked City, Ngofeen Mputubwele of wired.com uncovers one of the most fascinating; the story of the Congolese workers that worked under horrific conditions to mine the material used to build the bomb.
Mputubwele’s story is titled “The Dark History Oppenheimer Didn’t Show.” He attended a pre-release screening and described the memorable scenes in the film that show an empty glass bowl slowly being filled with marbles—“first one at a time, then in handfuls. The marbles represent the amount of uranium that has been successfully mined and refined to power the nuclear reaction.” As the bomb comes closer to fruition, more marbles are added to the bowl.
Where did the uranium come from?
“As the marbles steadily filled the bowl onscreen, I kept seeing what was missing: Black miners [in the Congo] hauling earth and stone to sort piles of radioactive ore by hand”, Mputubwele writes (https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-history-oppenheimer-didnt-show/#intcid=_wired-right-rail_00f7e954-50f6-4fe1-8a82-4f5a35e5dec4_popular4-1-reranked-by-vidi). The history of Belgium’s colonization in Africa is rife with state-sponsored terrorism, violence, no education opportunities, famine and dangerous slave-like labor conditions. “The colonial system built workers—or borderline enslaved people—not scholars,” Mputubwele adds..
The largest company in the Belgian Congo was the mining company Union-Minière du Haut-Katanga [whose directorwas the Belgian Edgar Sengier]. The colonial government had granted it the rights to an area spanning nearly 8,000 square miles, over half the size of Belgium. One of the mines there, Shinkolobwe, was rich with uranium. In fact, it was filled with uranium that the Congolese had already excavated and placed aboveground. Initially, uranium was just a waste byproduct of digging for the more valuable radium, which Nobel-prize winner Marie Curie had helped discover could treat cancer. In 1938, using uranium, the physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch worked out the calculations that defined nuclear fission. If enough nuclei were split, scientists realized, massive amounts of energy could be emitted. Uranium was now coveted.
While the U.S. apparently had a few uranium mines, Mputubwele cites a 1939 letter, drafted by Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist and Alexander Sachs, and signed by Albert Einstein, was sent to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which warned that the U.S. mines “has only very poor ores of uranium in moderate quantities.” The letter noted that Congo was “the most important source of uranium.”
The mining company typically built fenced-in compounds that resembled prison camps for the workers and their families; the company initially gave each family about 43 square feet—the size of a small garage—and weekly food rations. At work, miners sorted uranium ore by hand. One person described a piece of Shinkolobwe uranium as a block ‘as big as a pig’ It was ‘black and gold and looked as if it were covered with a green scum or moss.’ He called them ‘flamboyant stones.’
After Belgium was invaded by the Nazis, the governor-general of the Belgian Congo declared that the colony would support the Allies. Men were drafted, laborers were “offered up” and the governor general “created production quotas to supply the Allies with necessary war materials. And so, during the war, many Congolese returned to the very forests where their parents and grandparents had had their hands amputated, ordered to cull rubber again, this time for hundreds of thousands of military tires,” Mputubwele writes. “As the war ramped up, Congolese miners also dug for minerals like copper in around-the-clock shifts.”
Enter General Leslie Groves, assigned by President Roosevelt to head up the Manhattan Project, and his deputy Colonel Kenneth Nichols. Nichols soon met with Sengier and a deal was struck to start sending uranium to the U.S. Thus began a period of great intrigue, involving labor disputes, worker fatalities, American spies, Nazi spies. According to Mputubwele, “The Army Corps of Engineers was sent to the Congo to start up mining operations anew. The mine’s location was scrubbed from maps. Spies were told to eliminate the word ‘uranium’ from their conversations; rather, advisers added, use words like ‘diamonds.’”
As Jean Bele reported in a January/February 2021 story in the MIT Facility Newsletter titled “The Legacy of the Involvement of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the Bombs Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” another story that has been largely ignored “is the disastrous health effect on Congolese miners, who handled the uranium, working virtually as slaves of the Belgian mining giant Union-Minière du Haut-Katanga...” (fnl.mit.edu/january-february-2021/the-legacy-of-the-involvement-of-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-in-the-bombs-dropped-on-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/).
According to Bele, Article 3 of the Belgium Colonial Charter stated that ‘Nobody can be forced to work on behalf of and for the profit of companies or private,’ [yet] the Belgian government closed their eyes on the forced labor imposed on Congolese miners.”
Here’s the kicker and possible fuel for another film: “In 1946, Sengier became the first non-American to receive the president’s Medal for Merit—‘for the performance of an exceptionally meritorious or courageous act’ that sealed the Allies’ victory. In a photo from the ceremony, you might see something else: a man with something to hide. Intelligence during the war revealed that Sengier’s company also sold about 1.5 million pounds of Congolese uranium to the Nazis. In 1948, a radioactive mineral was named in Sengier’s honor: sengierite.”