Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [176]
Halban had some British and Canadian researchers at his disposal. He also sought to reconstitute the group of French and European scientists with whom he had worked in Paris, or whose work in France he had known there. Frances Perrin was in New York, but Halban passed him over, fearing that he might insist on having patent rights to equipment or procedures Halban’s group would have to use without obstacle. He did recruit Perrin’s brother-in-law Pierre Auger to head his division of experimental physics. Jules Gueron, a North African Jew who had taught in Strasbourg, joined the Free French, escaped to London, then moved in with Halban and Kowarski’s group at the Cavendish. Halban brought him to Montreal to take charge of physical chemistry. Also on the scene was Bruno Pontecorvo, whom Bertrand Goldschmidt would remember as his ‘charming Italian colleague from the Curie laboratory’ in Paris. Cleared by British security services, Pontecorvo arrived in Montreal in early 1943 prepared to do physics. (Designated by the codename ‘Mlad’, Pontecorvo passed information about the project to the Russians. He would later join the British nuclear project at Harwell, then, in the summer of 1950, defect with his family to the Soviet Union.)
Bertrand Goldschmidt escaped from France in early 1941. He managed to find passage on a crowded ship to Martinique. There, he ensconced himself at an upcountry hotel run by a black woman with a Jewish father, and inhabited also by a pair of German-Jewish filmmakers and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Weeks later, Goldschmidt found a seat on a tiny seaplane to Puerto Rico (when he arrived there he found Levi-Strauss in American custody; agents suspected his transcriptions of Amazonian language were an Axis code), then got to New York by mail boat in late May. After months of idleness, Goldschmidt took a volunteer job administering oral radioisotopes to hospitalized cancer patients. He also went to Canada to conduct experiments at a radium processing plant. Halban wrote in March 1942 and asked Goldschmidt to join him. Goldschmidt was interested, but the British were slow to give permission. When at last his hiring to Montreal was authorized, in the summer of 1942, Goldschmidt was astonished to learn that he was to be attached, with American consent, to Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory, to work in the chemistry lab under Glenn Seaborg. There, as the first and only Frenchman to participate in the Manhattan Project, Goldschmidt worked on uranium and plutonium extraction. He met Fermi, Oppenheimer, Groves (‘pleasant, slightly on the plump side, with an engaging manner’), was sworn many times to secrecy, and later called the experience ‘the most fascinating of my career’. Halban had finally got to Montreal himself and summoned Goldschmidt, in late October 1942, to induce plutonium while working in the project’s chemistry division.
The growing presence of Frenchmen in the Montreal lab was one of the reasons the Americans remained cool to the British scientists who had hired them. The Americans were worried mainly about security, since they viewed the French as unreliable. Groves, supported by Vannevar Bush and James Conant, refused to allow the shipment of heavy water or graphite to Canada, and insisted that nothing specific or technical about nuclear research, only basic science, be discussed with the Montreal team. Halban