Abstract

In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, Adolph Hitler and his Nazi armies set Europe and Western Russia ablaze, putting whole populations in chains, and set about methodically exterminating entire cultural groups of people. The Imperial Japanese Navy struck at the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The remainder of the Free World was ill-prepared to withstand the superbly equipped and trained totalitarian armies, navies and air forces. As Japanese forces swept through Eastern Asia and south to Australia, the survival of the Free World was doubtful.

As a source for new weapons, German and Japanese physicists were diligently experimenting with splitting the atom, and their governments were seizing the necessary foreign raw materials for an atomic bomb. Axis scientists were perfecting long-range bombers, other weapons and rockets, some of which could theoretically reach the United States.

American physicists and the scientific community, warned and alarmed by their European colleagues, prevailed upon Albert Einstein to alert President Franklin Roosevelt to the danger of this ultimate weapon, the atomic bomb. President Roosevelt commissioned the Manhattan Project (at great expense to the American people and the war effort) to exploit the atomic theory. It came as a surprise to the project scientists that large amounts of the necessary raw material, uranium, were not available. Where did it come from?

This then is the little-known story about the major source of our uranium during a very desperate time in our nation’s history, and the debt we free Americans owe to a Belgian national by the name of Edgar Sengier.