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In September 1942, the US Army went looking for the most important raw material of the war. They found it on Richmond Terrace on Staten Island. And it had been there for almost two years, with a label on it.
The story starts in London in May 1939. Edgar Sengier ran Union Minière, the Belgian company that owned the Shinkolobwe mine in the Congo. Shinkolobwe was a freak of nature. Its best ore ran 65 percent uranium oxide. After the war, three-tenths of one percent was considered a good find. But nobody much cared. Union Minière mined the stuff for radium. The uranium was what was left over… good for coloring ceramics but not much else. By 1937 the company had so much on hand that it shut the mine.
Then, at the turn of 1939, German chemists discovered fission and published the results. In January and February, Hahn and Strassmann published the discovery of fission, and Meitner and Frisch published the explanation. Physicists in the US and Europe repeated the experiment within weeks.
In the spring, Joliot-Curie’s Paris group published that fission releases extra neutrons, which is what makes a chain reaction conceivable. Szilard begged colleagues to keep such results quiet, and Joliot refused. By April, the German War Office had received a letter from physicists Paul Harteck and Wilhelm Groth about possible explosives, and a German uranium program began.
This was no secret. It was in the journals. Sir Henry Tizard, an adviser to the British government, paid attention. He met with Sengier and asked for an option on all of Shinkolobwe’s output. The answer was no. As the meeting broke up, Tizard warned him that he held “something that may mean a catastrophe to your country and mine” if it reached a possible enemy. Days later, back in Brussels, Frédéric Joliot-Curie told him much the same thing.
The timing is striking: Einstein’s famous letter to FDR is dated August 2, 1939. FDR didn’t get it until October. But a Belgian mining executive got the word months before the President of the United States.
In September 1939, Sengier moved to New York so he could continue to run the company if Belgium fell. He arranged to get the company’s stocks out of its Belgian refinery, too. The radium made it. About 3,500 tons of uranium compounds did not. The Germans got those in May 1940.
That left the Congo. In August 1940, Sengier ordered ore sent to New York by way of Lobito in Angola. The first shipment left in September and arrived in November. The second left in October and arrived in December. About 1,250 tons in all, packed in 2,007 steel drums and marked as uranium ore, product of the Belgian Congo. They went into an Archer-Daniels-Midland warehouse at 2393 Richmond Terrace in Port Richmond, at the foot of the Bayonne Bridge on Staten Island.
And there they sat.
It would be nice to report that Sengier was purely a farsighted patriot. Kenneth Nichols, the Army officer who eventually bought the ore, called his motives “partly patriotic, partly commercial,” and thought the commercial part was probably the bigger one. Radium was the real business. If Europe was overrun, Sengier wanted a supply in the US. Both things can be true. He was a businessman with a valuable product — one who had also been told it might end the world as he knew it.
He did try to tell someone. In March 1942, he met with officials at a government conference on non-ferrous metals. They only wanted to talk about cobalt.
What finally broke it loose was paperwork. In August 1942, Boris Pregel, an agent for both Union Minière and Canada’s Eldorado, tried to buy 500 tons of Sengier’s ore and applied for a license to export it to Canada for refining. The people running the American atomic program noticed. They’d been paying for ore supposedly hauled out of the Arctic, and some of it might instead be coming from Staten Island. On September 11, Vannevar Bush asked the Army to impose export controls.
On September 17, Leslie Groves took over the Manhattan Project. The next day, Nichols walked into Sengier’s office at 25 Broadway, within blocks of the project’s own headquarters. Could Union Minière supply uranium ore?
“It is in New York, a thousand tons of it,” Sengier said. He’d been waiting for someone to notice.
They wrote the deal in eight sentences on a yellow legal pad. The US got the Staten Island ore and first rights to another 3,000 tons in the Congo. Five days later they settled on $1.60 a pound. Sengier kept the radium, naturally.
By the start of 1947, the program had acquired about 10,000 tons of uranium oxide. The Congo supplied 68 percent. Nichols later wrote that without Sengier’s stockpiles, there wouldn’t have been enough uranium to justify building the giant plants in Oak Ridge.
The ore moved upstate to the Seneca Ordnance Depot. The Staten Island warehouse was reportedly torn down. But the radioactivity stayed. In 2023, the federal government began cleaning up the one-acre lot under the Bayonne Bridge.
Discussion (3)
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A great post. The Einstein letter to FDR didn't start the Manhattan Project for real; the Briggs committee explored theory and limited experiments. It was the British MAUD committee that kickstarted it all in 1941 by bluntly outlining how a bomb could be built. The Hiroshima uranium bomb is the result.
People don't realize how late in the game J. Robert Oppenheimer appeared. He was indispensable to the development of the weapon; neither he, nor any other individual, was its inventor.
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Indeed; Einstein is often given more credit than he deserves. It was Leo Szilard, another physicist who had fled Europe, who saw the urgency of the atomic bomb idea and worked to bring it to the attention of the U.S. government. Einstein supposedly admitted that he had not even thought of the possibility of an atomic bomb before Szilard brought it to his attention. Szilard wrote the letter to FDR, but asked Einstein to sign it, knowing that Einstein's name would ensure that it got the attention it deserved.
I was not previously aware of the Staten Island uranium. I'm not bothered at all by Sengier's commercial motives; after all, that's the system we were defending, right? I imagine the Germans didn't pay a dime for the uranium they got hold of in Belgium.