Sympathetic Vibratory Physics

The Manhattan Project was a research and development program, led by the United States with participation from the United Kingdom and Canada, that produced the first atomic bomb during World War II. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Army component of the project was designated the Manhattan District; "Manhattan" gradually superseded the official codename, "Development of Substitute Materials", for the entire project. Along the way, the Manhattan Project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys.

The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (roughly equivalent to $24.4 billion as of 2012). Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the fissionable materials, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites, some secret, across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Two types of atomic bomb were developed during the war. A relatively simple gun-type fission weapon was made using uranium-235, an isotope that makes up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium. Since it is chemically identical to the main isotope, uranium-238, and has almost the same mass, it proved difficult to separate. Three methods were employed for uranium enrichment: electromagnetic, gaseous and thermal. Most of this work was performed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Wikipedia, Manhattan Project

August 3rd, 1942. Office of the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Washington, D.C. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, Deputy District Engineer of the newly formed Manhattan Engineer District, sat across from Under Secretary of the Treasury Daniel W. Bell with an unusual request. The 34year-old engineer needed to borrow something from the United States government.
Something valuable enough to build an atomic bomb. "How much do you need?" Belle asked. "6,000 tons," Nicholls replied. Belle paused. "How many troy ounces is that?" Nicholls, a West Point graduate trained in engineering rather than precious metal accounting, admitted he didn't know. Neither did Belle. Growing impatient with the semantic confusion, Nicholls responded with characteristic military directness.
I don't know how many Troy ounces we need, but I know I need 6,000 tons. That is a definite quantity. What difference does it make how we express the quantity? Belle's reply came sharply. Young man, you may think of silver in tons, but the treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces. With their contrasting perspectives expressed, they settled on a form of agreement.
Over the next months, the Manhattan Project would borrow not 6,000 tons, but 14,700 tons of silver from United States Treasury vaults, approximately 395 million Troy ounces, worth roughly 16 billion at today's prices. This is the documented story of how America's most secret wartime project facing a critical copper shortage borrowed nearly the entire US silver reserve to build the machines that produce the uranium for Hiroshima and how those Calatron girls operating equipment they didn't understand helped win World War II. When Lieutenant
Colonel Kenneth Nichols first calculated the copper requirements for the electromagnetic isotope separation process in mid 1942, the number was staggering. 5,000 short tons, that's 4,500 metric tons of pure copper needed for the magnet coils alone. Under normal circumstances, obtaining copper wouldn't have been problematic, but 1942 was anything but normal.
Copper was critically scarce throughout American industry. The War Production Board had allocated virtually every pound of domestic copper production to essential military uses, electrical wiring for ships and aircraft, shell casings for ammunition, communications wire for field operations, radiators for tanks and vehicles.
The United States produced approximately 1 million tons of copper annually in the early 1940s, supplemented by imports from Chile and other sources. But wartime demand exceeded 1.5 million tons. Every industry competed for insufficient supply. Priorities were ruthlessly enforced. The Manhattan Engineer District, the secret organization tasked with building atomic weapons, had the highest priority rating possible, AAA.

September 18th, 1942, a US Army colonel in civilian clothes walked into a modest Manhattan office building just blocks from where the Manhattan project was secretly taking shape. Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols carried orders from General Leslie Groves himself. Find uranium and find it fast.
America's race to build the atomic bomb was accelerating, but they faced a crippling problem. They had almost no fuel. Nicholls sat down across from Edgar Sanir, a Belgian mining executive most Americans had never heard of. The colonel began his pitch explaining America's desperate need for uranium ore.
Then, Sanier said something that stopped nickels cold. You can have the ore now. It's in a warehouse in Staten Island. 1,200 tons of it. Nicholls blinked. Staten Island. The US military had been scouring the globe for uranium deposits. They'd sent geologists into the Rocky Mountains. They'd negotiated with Canadian mining companies for access to remote Arctic deposits.
And here, sitting less than 10 miles from downtown Manhattan, was more high-grade uranium than existed anywhere else in North America. And it had been there for over 2 years. But this wasn't just any uranium. What Sanir had stockpiled came from the richest uranium deposit ever discovered on Earth, a mine so extraordinarily pure that its ore contained 65% uranium.
To put that in perspective, mines in Colorado and Canada were celebrated if they yielded ore with just 0.03% uranium. The Shinkalabe mine in the Belgian Congo was more than 2,000 times richer. This single meeting would change the course of World War II because that Staten Island warehouse didn't just contain uranium.
It contained the fuel that would power the atomic age. Today, we’re uncovering the engineering miracle you’ve never heard about. How one man’s impossible gamble taken 2 years before anyone even asked solved the greatest material science challenge in military history. To understand why 1,200 tons of uranium sat forgotten in a Staten Island warehouse, we need to rewind to 1915 when a British geologist named Robert Sharp discovered something extraordinary in the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo. The Shinkalobe mine didn’t look

like much from the surface. The name itself came from a local term for a type of boiled apple that would burn your hand if squeezed. an eerily prophetic description for a deposit of radioactive ore. But when Yunon Minè Duo Katanga began industrial mining operations in 1921, geologists realized they’d stumbled onto something unprecedented.

The ore wasn’t just uranium bearing rock. Entire sections of the mine glowed with pitch blend, a dense black mineral that’s almost pure uranium oxide. While typical uranium deposits might contain fractions of a percent of actual uranium, shinkaway routinely yielded ore with uranium content between 20 and 65%.

Some samples hit 75%. Scientists had never seen anything like it. But in the 1920s and 1930s, nobody wanted uranium. They wanted radium. Radium discovered by Marie Cury in 1898 had become the miracle substance of the early 20th century. It glowed in the dark. It treated cancer. Radium painted watch dials allowed soldiers to read time in trenches.

At its peak, radium sold for $70,000 per gram, making it worth more than diamonds, more than platinum, more than gold. And radium was found alongside uranium in ore deposits. Yunyong Minè made fortunes extracting radium and simply stockpiling uranium nobody wanted. The mine operated profitably through the 1920s, sending radium to medical facilities worldwide.
Then the bottom fell out. By the mid 1930s, artificial radium production techniques crashed the market. Demand collapsed. The Shinkalobe mine flooded and fell into disrepair. Edgar Sanier, Yunyong Minè’s director, made the business decision to abandon it. Mountains of already mined uranium ore sat in storage at the mine site in Africa worthless.

But San was about to learn that uranium’s gay was coming and it would arrive with terrifying speed. In 1939, everything changed. Nuclear fision was discovered and suddenly every major power understood the implications. If you could split uranium atoms in a controlled chain reaction, you could release energy on a scale humanity had never harnessed.

And if you could do it uncontrolled in a weapon, you could level entire cities. Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. Edgar Sanair watched with alarm. As a Belgian businessman who’d lived through World War I, he understood what German expansion meant. When Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, Sanier fled to London and then to New York, establishing Unair’s operations in exile.

But before leaving Europe, Sanier had a critical meeting. British scientists already investigating atomic weapons possibilities warned him if Germany gains control of Shinkalobe uranium they could build an atomic bomb. France had tried to buy the uranium Britain expressed interest. The message was clear. This worthless metal wasn’t worthless anymore.

Sanier faced an engineering problem that was equal parts logistics and secrecy. He needed to move 1,200 tons of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo to somewhere safe. This wasn’t like shipping copper or coffee. Uranium ore is dense, heavy, and the barrels were literally stamped uranium ore, product of Belgian Congo. If word leaked, German intelligence would know exactly what to target.

The logistical challenges were immense. In late 1940, with German yubot prowling the Atlantic, Sanier arranged for the ore to be transported from Shinkalobe to Africa’s coast, loaded onto ships, and sent across submarinefested waters to New York Harbor. Each barrel weighed hundreds of pounds.
The shipment filled multiple vessels. But where to store it? Sanair needed a warehouse large enough to hold 1,200 tons located in a major port accessible by rail and truck yet inconspicuous enough that German spies wouldn’t notice. He found his answer on Staten Island in the Port Richmond neighborhood directly beneath the Bayon Bridge.

The three-story warehouse at 2393 Richmond Terrace became home to the world’s most valuable uranium stockpile. The barrels were stacked floor to ceiling. No guards, no military security, just industrial storage for a substance nobody in America was looking for yet. Sanier paid the storage fees from Unan Nier’s accounts and went about his business in Manhattan, operating the company’s wartime metals operations.

For two years, the uranium sat there. 1,200 tons of the purest uranium on Earth. Enough to fuel an atomic weapons program sitting in an unguarded commercial warehouse where anyone could have walked in. Meanwhile, the United States was scrambling. After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, America accelerated its atomic research.

The Manhattan Project was officially born. General Leslie Groves took command in September 1942. His first question, “Where’s the uranium?” The news was grim. US geologists had located deposits in Colorado, but the ore quality was abysmal, often containing less than.1% uranium. Canadian deposits at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories were better with ore around.

5 to 1% uranium, but extracting it from the remote Arctic location created nightmarish logistics. Kenneth Nichols, Groves’s deputy, later recalled the desperation. They needed thousands of tons of ore to produce just kilograms of weaponsgrade uranium 235 through enrichment. Lowgrade ore meant building massive processing plants.

Time was running out. Intelligence suggested Germany was pursuing the same technology. Then Sanier applied for a permit. He wanted to ship some uranium ore from Unan’s African stockpiles to Canada for processing. The permit request crossed the desk of someone at the State Department who knew about Manhattan project needs.

Word reached Nicholls on September 18th, 1942. Nicholls walked into Sanreer’s office expecting difficult negotiations about African mining rights. Instead, he got the shock of his military career. “How much do you need?” Sanier asked. Nicholls explained the Manhattan Project’s calculations. They’d need thousands of tons of uranium ore, preferably the highest grade available.

Every percentage point of purity mattered. It meant smaller enrichment plants, faster processing, earlier bomb development. Sanier smiled. I have 1,200 tons of 65% ore in Staten Island. You can have it now. Nicholls later wrote that he had to verify he’d heard correctly. 65% in Staten Island. The colonel excused himself and made phone calls.

Within hours, Manhattan project officials were inspecting the warehouse. What they found exceeded their best case scenarios. The ore quality wasn’t just good, it was miraculous. Remember Canadian ore from the El Dorado mine at Great Bear Lake? considered excellent contained.5 to 1% uranium. Colorado ore contained even less.

Processing these ores meant moving mountains of rock to extract tiny amounts of uranium. But Shinkalobe ore was different. With 65% uranium content, every ton of ore yielded 650 kg of uranium, over 1,400 lb. Processing this material was comparatively simple. The engineering advantage was staggering. Let’s break down what this meant technically.

To produce 1 kg of weaponsgrade uranium 235, you first need to process thousands of kg of natural uranium ore. The ore must be crushed, chemically treated to extract uranium oxide, then converted to uranium hexaflloride gas for enrichment in massive gaseous diffusion plants like the one being built in Oakidge, Tennessee. With.

1% ore, producing 1 kg of natural uranium requires processing 1,000 kg of rock. You need enormous crushers, vast chemical treatment facilities, and mountains of tailings. With 65% ore, you only need to process about 1.5 kg of rock for the same kilogram of uranium. The difference in scale, cost, equipment, and time was revolutionary.

The Manhattan Project immediately purchased all 1,200 tons from the Staten Island warehouse. But they didn’t stop there. Sanier also negotiated the saleof an additional 3,000 tons, still stockpiled above ground at the Shinkalobu mine in Africa. By the end of 1942, the United States had secured access to over 4,000 tons of the world’s highest grade uranium ore.

The engineering challenge now shifted to logistics and secrecy. The army needed to transport this material from Staten Island to processing facilities, first to refineries in Canada, then to Oakidge for enrichment. They established code names for Congo uranium product X or African ore. In internal documents, Shinkalobe didn’t exist.

Getting the uranium out of Staten Island required careful planning. The Manhattan Engineer District sent military trucks to the warehouse. Working at night, soldiers loaded barrel after barrel onto vehicles. The operation took weeks. Each barrel was logged, assigned a tracking number, and shipped to secure facilities.
The warehouse was eventually emptied, and the building was returned to civilian use. For decades, nobody knew what had been stored there. Meanwhile, additional Shinkalobe ore was being extracted in Africa and shipped under military escort. The Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, established a station in the Belgian Congo with a single mission, protect the Shinkalobe uranium supply and keep it out of access hands.

American intelligence officers worked with Belgian colonial administrators to guard the mine site and monitor local populations for German spies. The ore went to two primary locations. Canadian refineries at Port Hope, Ontario, processed much of the Shinkalobe material, converting ore to purified uranium oxide. This made sense.

Canada had experience refining uranium from its own mines and offered a secure location away from potential German sabotage. From Canada, the refined uranium went to Oak Ridge. At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Manhattan project had built the K25 gaseous diffusion plant at the time the largest building in the world.

Here uranium was converted to uranium hexaflloride gas and passed through thousands of stages of diffusion membranes to separate lighter uranium 235 atoms from heavier uranium 238. This process required enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water, which is why Oak Ridge was built near the Tennessee Valley cooling water.
with Shinkalobe uranium’s purity made Oak Ridg’s job dramatically easier. Less ore meant less chemical processing, fewer impurities to remove, and faster enrichment cycles. By mid 1945, Oak Ridge had produced enough enriched uranium 235 to build a gun type atomic bomb, the design that required no testing and would be used directly in combat.

But how much of the Manhattan project’s uranium actually came from Congo? The numbers are striking. According to Department of Energy historical records, approximately 2/3 of all uranium ore used in the Manhattan project came from Shinkalobe. Canadian sources provided most of the remaining third with smaller contributions from Colorado.

Without Shinkalobe, the Manhattan project would have faced delays of years, not months. Building larger processing plants for lowgrade ore would have consumed resources, manpower, and time. Germany would have had longer to develop their own weapons. The Pacific War might have dragged into 1946 or beyond with casualties mounting.

Edgar Sanier’s decision to ship that uranium in 1940, 2 years before anyone asked for it stands as one of the most consequential acts of foresight in engineering history. He couldn’t have known exactly how it would be used, but he understood that material availability would determine outcomes, and he made sure the right side had access.

The uranium from Staten Island moved through the Manhattan Project’s processing pipeline at unprecedented speed. By early 1945, Oak Ridge had enriched enough uranium 235 to construct Little Boy, the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. Little Boy was a gun type weapon, relatively simple in design. It worked by firing one subcritical mass of uranium 235 into another subcritical mass, creating a superc critical mass that would initiate a chain reaction.

The bomb required approximately 64 kg of uranium 235 enriched to about 80% purity. A massive enrichment challenge. Here’s where Shinkalobi’s contribution becomes crystal clear. The enrichment process at Oak Ridge was inefficient. Even with the best cascading gaseous diffusion technology, only a tiny fraction of uranium fed into the system came out as weaponsgrade material.

Starting with high purity ore meant far more uranium made it through the entire chain from mine to refinement to enrichment to weapons fabrication. On August 6th, 1945, Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion released energy equivalent to 15,000 tons of TNT. Less than 2% of the uranium 235 in the bomb actually fisioned. The rest was scattered.

But that 2% was enough to destroy five square miles of city instantly and kill approximately 70,000 people immediately with many more dying from radiation andinjuries in subsequent weeks and months. Nearly 2/3 of the uranium used in the Manhattan project and therefore in Little Boy came from a single source, the Shinkalobe mine that Edgar Sangier had the foresight to secure years earlier.

After the war, the true story began to emerge. On April 9th, 1946, in a ceremony kept secret for years, General Leslie Groves awarded Edgar Sangar the Medal for merit, the highest civilian honor the United States could bestow. Sangare became the first non-American civilian to receive this award. The citation remained classified for years, mentioning only exceptional service to the war effort.

The specifics that he’d provided the uranium for the atomic bomb remained secret. Sangar preferred it that way. He avoided publicity, declined interviews, and returned to Belgium to live quietly after the war. When he died on July 26th, 1963, few obituaries mentioned his role in the Manhattan Project. The world had moved on and Shinkalobay’s story faded into obscurity.

But the mine’s legacy continued. During the Cold War, the United States signed agreements with Belgium to continue extracting Shinkalobu uranium for America’s growing nuclear weapons stockpile. The mine operated through the 1950s, providing material for hydrogen bomb development. When the Democratic Republic of Congo gained independence in 1960, the mine was officially closed and sealed with concrete.

By that time, Shinkalobe had provided uranium for American weapons for nearly two decades. The Staten Island warehouse itself remained in commercial use for decades. In the 1980s, the Department of Energy conducted radiological surveys as part of the formerly utilized sites remediation program. They found low-level radioactive contamination, residual traces from those 1,200 tons of uranium that sat there from 1940 to 1942.

Cleanup operations began in the 2000s and by the 2020s the US Army Corps of Engineers was conducting final remediation. Only then did the full story become public knowledge. Kenneth Nichols, the officer who met with Sangar that September day in 1942, went on to a distinguished military career. He became the district engineer of the entire Manhattan project in 1943, overseeing Oak Ridge and other facilities.

After the war, he rose to Lieutenant General, but he never forgot that meeting with Sangar. In his memoirs, Nicholls called it the luckiest break the Manhattan Project ever got. General Groves echoed that assessment in postwar reports. He acknowledged that without the Congo uranium, particularly that Staten Island stockpile ready to ship immediately, the atomic bomb might not have been ready before Germany or Japan developed their own versions.

Time was everything, and Sangar’s foresight bought the time America desperately needed. The Shinkalobe story reveals a truth about major engineering projects that textbooks often miss. Material availability determines outcomes as much as technical brilliance. Think about it. Los Alamos had the theoretical physicists. Oak Ridge had the industrial engineers.

Hanford had the plutonium production reactors. But without uranium ore, and specifically highgrade uranium ore, none of it mattered. You can’t enrich what you don’t have. You can’t process material that doesn’t exist. Edgar Sanier understood something fundamental about industrial warfare. Whoever controls the raw materials controls the timeline.

His decision to move uranium to American soil in 1940 wasn’t based on detailed knowledge of nuclear physics. He simply recognized that uranium had become strategically valuable and that value would only increase. The engineering lesson extends beyond nuclear weapons. Every major technology leap in history, steel production, semiconductor manufacturing, renewable energy, hits the same bottleneck.

You need material. Not just any material, but the right material in the right quantity with the right purity at the right time. Shinkabe’s 65% uranium ore gave the Manhattan project something priceless. margin for error. They could afford inefficient early enrichment designs because they started with such pure material.

They could run experiments, test processes, and refine techniques without worrying about running out of feed stock. Compare that to Germany’s atomic program, which struggled with material shortages throughout the war. German scientists understood nuclear physics as well as their American counterparts, but they lacked access to high-grade uranium.

Norwegian heavy water facilities were sabotaged. Czechoslovakian uranium mines were lowgrade. By 1945, German atomic research was years behind, not because of inferior science, but because of inferior logistics. The Congo itself paid a heavy price. Uranium mining at Shinkalaguay employed thousands of Congalles workers under brutal colonial conditions.

Safety precautions were minimal. Radiation exposure went unmonitored. Workers hauled uranium ore without protection, breathed uranium dust, and drankcontaminated water. The full health impact on those workers and their communities has never been properly documented or compensated. After Belgian Congo gained independence and became the Democratic Republic of Congo, Shinkalabe fell into disrepair again.

The mine was officially closed and sealed in 1960. But in the 1990s and 2000s, unauthorized miners returned, digging through radioactive tailings in search of copper and cobalt. The uranium is still there along with dangerous levels of radon gas and contaminated groundwater. Today the site is officially off limits monitored by Congolese military forces and international nuclear security organizations but enforcement is difficult in a region plagued by conflict.

The fear is that terrorist organizations or rogue states could obtain Shinkalabe uranium, the same extraordinarily pure ore that built the first atomic bomb. So what do we learn from the Staten Island uranium secret? First, in global technological competition, raw material supply chains are strategic weapons. Today we see this with rare earth elements for electronics, lithium for batteries, and semiconductor grade silicon.

Nations that control material sources control technological futures. China understood this and now dominates rare earth production. The United States learned this lesson in 1942 when they discovered their atomic future sat waiting in a Staten Island warehouse. Second, individual foresight can change history.

Edgar Sangare made a business decision that became a warwinning strategy. He couldn’t predict exactly how uranium would be used, but he recognized its value and secured access. How many technology breakthroughs today are bottlenecked not by knowledge, but by someone failing to stockpile the right material at the right time? Third, engineering solutions aren’t always about building something new.

Sometimes the solution is about seeing what’s already there. Kenneth Nichols was ready to negotiate complex African mining operations. Instead, he found everything he needed, waiting 10 miles away, already paid for, already secure. The best engineering solution is often the one that requires the least new construction.

The Staten Island warehouse still stands, though it’s been remediated and repurposed. There’s no plaque, no memorial, no historical marker explaining that this ordinarylook building once held the fuel for the atomic age. Local residents walk past, never knowing that this nondescript location changed world history.

Perhaps that’s fitting. The greatest engineering achievements often hide in plain sight. A warehouse that no one noticed, filled with metal no one wanted until suddenly it became the most important substance on Earth. The Congo uranium secret reminds us that worldchanging innovations require three things: scientific knowledge, engineering capability, and material availability.

Master any two and you’re still dead in the water. Master all three and you reshape the future. Edgar Sangare mastered the third leg of that triangle. And in doing so, he ensured that when the atomic age dawned, it would be powered by uranium that had been waiting, patient and deadly, in a warehouse beneath the Bayon Bridge.

Bridging Science and Spirituality

Search

Manhattan Project