Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [175]
The British appear to have been more relieved than elated with their success. Some in government told themselves that their possession of a testable atomic weapon would provide them with a deterrent against a nuclear attack, presumably by the Soviet Union. The bomb had also come to symbolize great-power status by the early 1950s; it was something that anyone with international standing was expected to have. But Hurricane failed to win American or Soviet respect for British physics or military science, in the light of the bigger bombs those nations were developing even as Penney and the others toasted in the Monte Bellos. The Russians evidently ignored the British test. The Americans at first dismissed it as inconsequential, and when asked if he now thought about increasing nuclear collaboration with Britain, a member of Congress said derisively, ‘we would be trading a horse for a rabbit’. The British built more atomic bombs, deliverable ones, in a project called, incongruously, ‘Blue Danube’. And they went to work on a thermonuclear device, making enough progress by late 1957 for even the Americans to be surprised and impressed. In mid-1958 Congress relaxed restrictions placed twelve years earlier on Anglo-American nuclear collaboration.4
2. The French atomic bomb
Like their British counterparts, French scientists had been at the forefront of nuclear research before the war: Marie and Pierre Curie had experimented with radioactive radium as far back as 1898, their daughter, Irene, and her husband, Frederic Joliot, continued and advanced the Curies’ efforts during the 1930s and did pioneering work on fission. (Frederic would help to remove 185 kilograms of heavy water from Paris to Britain just in advance of the conquering Germans in 1940.) Joliot and other French nuclear scientists developed far-sighted laboratory practices in France before the war. Joliot’s chief collaborators on fission research in the 1930s were Hans von Halban, an Austrian, and Lew Kowarski, who was Russian. Both were attracted to Paris by Joliot’s reputation and his ready store of radium, first at the Radium Institute, then at Joliot’s new labs at the College de France. (Also to Joliot’s side came Bruno Pontecorvo, an engaging young Italian physicist.) The physical chemist Bertrand Goldschmidt started, in 1933, as the lab assistant of Joliot’s mother-in-law at the Radium Institute. Also in Paris at the same time were young physicists Francis Perrin, son of a Nobel Prize winner, and Pierre Auger, who would become Perrin’s brother-in-law. Goldschmidt, Halban, and Kowarski were Jews; the latter two were naturalized Frenchmen in 1939. That March, Joliot, Halban, and Kowarski split the uranium nucleus with a neutron, publishing their results, despite a plea for silence from Leo Szilard, in the British journal Nature the following month.
The German occupation scattered the nuclear community of Paris and France. While Joliot and Irene Curie stuck it out and did their best to confuse the Nazis about their work, most of the others fled. Halban and Kowarski accompanied the French heavy-water shipment aboard the British coal ship Broompark out of Bordeaux to England in June 1940. Both scientists were dispatched to the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, where they drew together a handful of others and resumed their research, hoping to produce more fissions, more neutrons, and ultimately to construct reactors. The following summer, the MAUD Committee reached its conclusion that atomic bombs might be possible to build. But it seemed clear by late that summer that the apparatus necessary to build a bomb was unaffordable