Russia is keen to boost its clout in Africa -- for reasons that are frankly nefarious given the odious nature of Vladimir Putin's regime -- and nuclear power is one of the paths it is taking.

Listen to this article 8 min Listen to this article 8 min The atom bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 had a little-known African connection.

About two-thirds of the uranium used in "Little Boy", as the bomb was dubbed, was extracted from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Shinkolobwe was by far the richest uranium mine in the world at the time, and while Belgium was occupied by Nazi Germany the Congo was administered by the Belgian government in exile in London.

Like everything else linked to the Manhattan Project, this was wrapped in a water-tight veil of secrecy, including the exploitation of Congolese workers who did the dirty and dangerous work of mining the uranium.

"The United States was determined to obtain all the uranium it needed from the Congo, and at the same time deny German attempts to secure any Congolese uranium," Jean Marie Okwo-Bele, a nuclear physicist at MIT, wrote in an article for the faculty newsletter in 2021.

In 1944, it emerged that some Belgian companies in the Congo had illicitly sold uranium to the Germans.

"Over 1,200 people were sentenced to death...