The Ways Hiroshima Exposed the Supremacist Foundation of the Modern Civilization

 Hiroshima the Graveyard of Decency of the Modern Man

The Allies won World War II thanks to two bombs whose raw materials were made from African uranium, and the two strikes forced Japan to surrender. On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the nuclear bomb "Little Baby" (the code name for the bomb) on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On the 9th of the same month, its air force dropped another nuclear bomb called "Fat Man" on the city of Nagasaki. But the world was amazed by the power of the two bombs, which were later revealed to have been made from uranium from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Supremacists Instrumentalization of Science 

"Sir, the element uranium may be a new and important source of energy in our time, and this unique element may lead us to build a bomb that will be a new and very powerful type, never known before.. The most important source of uranium is the Belgian Congo."  These are the words  of the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein addressed to former US President Franklin Roosevelt, in a letter dated August 2, 1939.

The US authorities implemented the researchers' recommendations and began to exploit the "Shinkolobwe Mine" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was then a Belgian colony. The mine is located in the Katanga province, on the borders with Angola, Zambia and Tanzania, and is rich in various minerals.

Six years after Einstein's letter, as World War II ended in November 1945, striking Congolese workers were protesting the squalid living and working conditions in both Leopoldville (now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and the port of Matadi, through which most of the uranium was shipped to the United States. But they were punished by being killed, along with their women and children, and no one cared about them, local activists say.

Supremacism-driven colonialism and plunder

The Congo was under Belgian occupation, and its people suffered from a colonial reality based on racism, discrimination and inequality. In her recent book, Who Killed Dag Hammarskjöld, the second UN Secretary-General whose plane crashed in the Congo in 1961, researcher Susan Williams wrote that “the moral authority of the struggle against fascism did not eliminate inequality and injustice in the Congo,” adding that “the workers at Shinkolobwe had no protection from radiation.” The Belgian Congo had the richest uranium in the world, with its raw material containing an average of 65% uranium oxide, compared with less than 1% in American or Canadian raw material.

After the war, the mine became a flashpoint in the Cold War between the superpowers, having been the launching pad for the Manhattan Project during World War II. 

 The mine is now closed, but some workers still go to the site to extract uranium and cobalt, saying they work independently to make a living.

After finding important documents that had been hidden from the public in the archives of Oxford University, which granted her access because the Hammarskjöld case was outdated, the author Susan describes how America's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) recruited a team to deliver uranium to the United States and ensure that it did not fall into the hands of Nazi Germany.

“The squad included a group of well-trained officers for espionage purposes, who claimed to be rubber prospectors or diamond smuggling investigators, but never mentioned the word uranium. Even in coded telegrams they referred to raw materials, diamonds, or simply precious stones, but they did not say why the United States was in dire need of a regular supply of high-quality uranium ore from the Belgian Congo,” she added.

Although the mining association at the time sold large quantities of uranium ore to Germany, Edgar Singer, director of the General Assembly of Belgium and president of the mining association in Upper Katanga during World War II, was a key ally of the United States, and was later awarded the Medal of Merit, then the highest civilian award of the American government.

In his book "A History of Uranium", American researcher Tom Zollner recounts how Edgar Singer intervened on behalf of the Americans and provided them with what they needed for the Manhattan Project, as he "shipped 1,000 tons of uranium ore from the Shinkolobwe mine and sent it to the New York warehouse in 1939, in addition to a modest amount brought from the German submarine "U 234" that was captured after Germany's surrender in May 1945."

Just as the matter of these spies was hidden, the American nuclear project's dependence on Congolese ore remained a secret for many years as well.

After the Hiroshima bomb, a statement issued by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill drew attention to the "indispensable raw material for the project", meaning uranium, and said that Canada had provided it, and he never mentioned the Congo. These secret agreements, whose repercussions did not extend beyond the geographical borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, had a very clear impact on the local community.