DRC 'Fun' Fact

I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of all things African is pretty limited. Sure I've been to Morocco, but that hardly counts as Africa (except that it's physically on the landmass). But through my work at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), and with many of my friends at the LSE who are interested in Africa, a flatmate who studies African politics, and two friends who just moved there (one to South Africa and the other to Tanzania), my interest has officially been piqued.

As I've been working on my dissertation (which is due all too soon), I've been trying to bone up on (aside: where does that expression come from?!?!) my African geography and general knowledgebase. Which is why, when an old friend from school who is now into her third year of med school said she was interested in maybe spending a year in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), and we both joked that it would be too dangerous, I decided that I needed to find out more about why exactly it would be too dangerous. So Wikipedia, there I went.

And the interesting DRC fact that I learned:

"The Belgian Congo, which was also rich in uranium deposits, supplied the uranium that was used by the United States to build the atomic weapons that were used in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945."

I had no idea! I thought that we had rich uranium deposits in Nevada that we sourced from in that era. Since there was no source cited, I thought I'd do a little search and indeed, iafrica.com backed up this assertion.

So now I just need to figure out why, besides the uranium, the DRC is a dangerous place... back to the Wikipedia (oh, and the dissertation)!