Atomic Bombings At 80: How US Spies Secured The Hiroshima Uranium
Since the first use of a nuclear weapon in Hiroshima 80 years ago today, on Aug. 6, 1945, the story of where the uranium for the bomb came from and the covert operation the U.S. employed to secure it was little known.
That was until the 2016 publication of the book, Spies in the Congo, by British researcher Susan Williams (Public Affairs Books, New York), which unveiled for the first time the detailed story of the deep cover race between the Americans and the Nazis to get their hands on the deadliest metal on earth.
At the outset of World War II, when the U.S. launched the extraordinarily secret Manhattan Project, mines in North America and most of the rest of the world yielded ore with less than one percent uranium, considered inadequate to build the first atom bombs.