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Awesome article and interesting to see Heisenberg get it wrong. It really was a perfect situation for the US because we could get all the radioactive material with little issue.

A clean reminder that logistics is everything.

Also cool that the author is married to Sean Carroll.

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It mega-helped that Edgar Sengier saw the importance of uranium ore and shipped 1200 tons of it out of the Congo to New York before the U.S. government even realized it would need it.

Wow that is wild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Sengier:

“In September 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols met Sengier in his New York office. Nichols had been ordered to find uranium by the head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves. He asked if the Union Minière could supply uranium ore, and Sengier's answer became history: "You can have the ore now. It is in New York, a thousand tons of it. I was waiting for your visit."”

We always knew they weren't close because Moe Berg was going to shoot Heisenberg during his lectures in Zurich if he suspected they were.

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