• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1124 0

and the others pushed ahead anyway. In early 1943, Goldschmidt and Auger, who had previously taught at the University of Chicago, and both still in possession of university identification cards, returned to Chicago and were happily received by their former colleagues. Auger returned to Montreal with good information about Fermi’s squash court pile, which had gone critical two months earlier, while Goldschmidt pocketed a test tube, courtesy of Seaborg, containing a tiny amount of plutonium that Goldschmidt had helped to distill the previous summer. There were several further openings over the next nine months. The signing, by Roosevelt and Churchill, of the Quebec Agreement on 19 August 1943, briefly raised hopes of renewed collaboration, and it was followed by the arrival of the British team at Los Alamos. In March 1944 Chadwick managed to persuade Groves to let the Montreal group build a heavy-water reactor as a pilot plant. Perhaps to placate Groves, the British sacked Halban as project director and replaced him with John Cockcroft, who had welcomed Halban and Kowarski to Cambridge nearly four years before but who was otherwise untainted, in Groves’s mind, by association with France.

Under Cockcroft’s measured leadership, and with renewed cooperation from the Met Lab, the Montreal project went forward. In July 1944 Goldschmidt and Gueron received a shipment of metal slugs, which had been irradiated in a reactor at Oak Ridge. Experimenting with a new process to extract uranium from the slugs (the French called them ‘hot dogs’) by use of a chemical solvent, Goldschmidt went to work. Meanwhile, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and destined to play the leading role in French politics after the war, stopped briefly in Ottawa during a tour of North America. Auger, Goldschmidt, and Gueron decided that de Gaulle must learn about the bomb. De Gaulle’s representatives gave them three minutes; it was Gueron who got the honor of telling the general, and of urging de Gaulle to retain the colony of Madagascar, which held uranium. Afterwards, in a reception line, de Gaulle said to Goldschmidt: ‘I thank you. I understood you very well.’ With Halban sidelined, the pile expert Kowarski appeared in Montreal. Reactor work speeded up then, and plans progressed for a large nuclear complex, run jointly by Britain, Canada, and France, and located 200 kilometers west of Ottawa at a lonely but beautiful place Champlain had called ‘the hollow river’ during his seventeenth-century explorations. (It was now called the Chalk River.) The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki startled the Montreal team but did not stop it. On 5 September 1945 the Montreal reactor went critical. Kowarski called it Zeep, for Zero Energy Experimental Pile. Chalk River opened that fall. It was a rough and ready place, appropriately christened, in November, by Canada’s Minister of Munitions and Supply Clarence Howe, who ceremonially urinated on an outside wall. Early the next year, the Americans insisted that Goldschmidt, by then the last French scientist remaining with the Canadian project, be removed to France, as he was (they claimed) jeopardizing any possibility of future Anglo-American nuclear collaboration. Goldschmidt duly left, carrying in his head a good deal of valuable information to France.

The American desire to strip the North American nuclear programs of French participants helped to reunite them in Paris. Like Josef Stalin, de Gaulle had been struck by the power of the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima, and, though he professed ‘despair’ at the appearance of atomic weapons in the world, he wasted little time in creating a government agency to oversee nuclear issues: the Commissariat a l’Energie Atomique (CEA). It was headed by Frederic Joliot-Curie—who, with his wife, had hyphenated his surname during the war—and Raoul Dautry, an engineer and former minister of armaments who was an astute administrator and, unlike Joliot-Curie, not a communist. Theirs was a fruitful relationship, and it moved the French nuclear project briskly forward. Gueron, Auger,