Congo’s uranium tragedy

At a book talk at Busboys and Poets in DC, Friends of the Congo’s Maurice Carney, and Beyond Nuclear’s Linda Pentz Gunter, laid out the uranium story that threads through the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s sad history, including how 70% of Congo uranium was used in the atomic bomb dropped 81 years ago on Hiroshima.

Today, the Congo (DRC) is a country ravaged by endless conflict, leading to a genocide of now at least 8 million people, made worse by the current Ebola virus outbreak. It’s also the plundering ground for minerals. What many don’t know is that 80% of the uranium used in the Hiroshima (70%) and Nagasaki (10%) atomic bombs came from the Congo, and the uranium nightmare didn’t stop there. Maurice Carney, executive director of Friends of the Congo, and Beyond Nuclear’s Linda Pentz Gunter, were at Busboys and Poets last week discussing this and other human rights violations in the nuclear sector that Linda highlights in her book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War(opens in new tab). 

Radio station WPFW and its AfricaNow! show was there to record it all. (Headline photo of Pentz Gunter and Carney by Mwiza Munthali)

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