The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Congo

Congo is the second-largest country in Africa and has always been rich in two particular things: natural resources and misery.

The most miserable period of all was when King Leopold II of Belgium used the country as his private rubber farm. He enslaved everyone he encountered and had upwards of ten million people killed. That’s an entire Sweden. Or an entire Belgium, if you prefer.

When Congo gained independence many difficult years later, a certain Joseph Mobutu ended up in the president’s chair. He became most famous for selling his country’s resources to the highest under-the-table bidder, keeping the money for himself, and changing his name to ‘the All-powerful Warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’.

This guy, thought the United States, was the future of Congo and Africa. And, with the kind aid of the CIA, the All-powerful Warrior remained in power for several decades. Uranium succeeded rubber as the most interesting natural resource. Indeed, the USA received the uranium for the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Congo and, as thanks for the help, assisted in the installation of a Congolese nuclear research facility under the leadership of the all-powerful one who left fire in his wake. It’s possible that this was not the United States’ brightest political decision in history.

In the country where everything was corrupt, no exceptions, large quantities of enriched uranium vanished. Some of it turned up here and there and could be secured, while an unknown amount remained missing.

Time passed. The most important security services in the Western world no longer had the energy to search for what couldn’t be found. What remained was to try to keep any more from reaching the black market. Some of those with operational units found comfort in the fact that at least the missing uranium lost strength with each year that went by.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, however, was in possession of knowledge that made her view of the whole thing rather less rosy. Frau Merkel had already been around longer than most of the world’s leaders and she was counting on being re-elected next autumn. Her background as a chemist told her that she would not be in her current position on the day the missing isotope no longer posed a potential threat to her country. To be sure, she still had a lot to give, even at the age of sixty-three, after twenty-eight years in politics. But even so, her own half-life was considerably shorter than that of enriched uranium: four point five billion years.