Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Africa (3)

Linde was one of two firms, which secretly processed K-65 residue for the Manhattan Engineer District (MED—codename of the crash bomb-building project). The other was Mallinekrodt Chemical Works of St. Louis Missouri; with headquarter in Dublin, Ireland.

The Linde Company, in particular, converted Congolese (and other) uranium oxides into uranium tetrafluoride, or “green salt”. Processing units elsewhere, would react the green salt with magnesium to convert it, first to uranium metal and then into ingots, which were shipped to various clandestine sites.

“K-65” signified the uranium content of the African ore and its province of origin, in the then Belgian Congo. In Katanga, the mineral was mined at the small village of Shikolobwe, where the extracted ore had a yield of 65 percent uranium—higher than anywhere else on Earth.

Uranium was available, for instance, from Canada’s Eldorado Mine at Great Bear and from the plateau area of the U.S. state of Colorado. Initially, the Manhattan Project had relied on these sources. But neither the quantity nor the quality of their ores, could meet MED’S urgent needs.

“In the earliest stages…,” notes a compendium of the Canadian Coalition For Nuclear Responsibility, “Eldorado ores… played a key role…. In… 1942, however, things changed. It was not the… Eldorado mine that would determine the pace of the Manhattan Project, but the rich African concentrates…”

The K-65 concentrates, which Linde processed at its Ceramics Plant in Tonawanda, New York State (and poured the radioactive waste into underground wells and a nearby creek!), are commonly referred to as “residue” or “tailings”: Because uranium was actually a secondary product of extraction.

Prior to the discovery of nuclear fission, and the ensuing advent of MED, the market for uranium was small; and the ore was scarce. Its main use was in the manufacture of bright yellow, orange and green pigments for glazing ceramics and, historically, staining glass windows for churches.

The metal was mined primarily to obtain radium—which is derived, in nature, from the radioactive decay of uranium and, accordingly, is associated with it geologically. After 1903, radium was widely used in the treatment or cancer and for painting luminous hands on watches and dials.

Wikipedia reports that, “Radium metal was first industrially produced in the beginning of the 20th century by Biraco, a subsidiary company of Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK) in its Olen plant in Belgium”.

Congo being a Belgium colony, UMHK naturally obtained its ore from Katanga. By 1926, writes John F. Harrington, in The Salt Lake City Weekly, the Belgians monopolized radium production “and were charging $70,000 U.S. dollars a gram. The material was used in the first prototypes of X-ray machines. Fabulous profits were extracted from the Shinkolobwe ore”.

The meaning of “Shinkolobwe” isn’t all that clear. It apparently translates from the local dialect as “the fruit that scalds”—paean to a thorny, apple-like fruit with a porous, insulating interior. Squeezed too soon after boiling, hot water trapped inside can ooze out and burn the impatient hand.

Yet, according to the Belgian GECO Project website, “Shinkoloobwe” is also the name of a small river that has its source at the base of a high hill… It [the hill] was a protruding outcrop in the eroded area of a Cu-Co [copper and cobalt] deposit, about 3 km east of the native village of Kasolo”.

In any event, the outcrop is centrally important in the story of Africa and the A-Bomb. So too, is the legendary Bateke Ghost Warriors: Who used to strike terror in their opponents, by appearing in the forest on dark nights, with their bodies aglow in bluish-white light.

J.K. Obatala