Himanshu Kohli retweetledi
Look at Chavara on the attached map. In 1909, a German chemist named C.W. Schomberg was walking on these very beaches. He noticed a strange, shimmering black tint in the sand. Most locals thought it was just dirt. Schomberg, a man with a trained eye, realized he was standing on Monazite, the world’s richest source of Thorium.
He quietly started shipping the sand back to Germany under the guise of ballast for ships. By the time the British realized what was happening, Germany had built a secret stockpile of Indian Thorium that they hoped would power their future industrial & potentially weaponized ambitions. India’s sand was literally the hidden fuel of the early 20th-century German labs.
Also, there is a mineral in that Odisha-Andhra corridor called Zircon. We cannot build a modern nuclear reactor/a stealth jet w/o it. For yrs, Sand Smuggling has been a high-stakes, dangerous underground industry in these corridors. Because a single ton of concentrated sand from these specific blue zones can be worth more than its weight in silver to a country trying to build a secret nuclear program.
Image Source: @SputnikInt
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