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By Root 1237 0

Perrin, Kowarski, and Goldschmidt were all involved. They set up shop at an old fort at Chatillon, on the edge of Paris. The French had contracted with Norsk Hydro for heavy water in March 1940; the shipment, 5 tons, was now delivered, six years later. Joliot-Curie also requisitioned 8 tons of uranium oxide that had been hidden from the Germans in Morocco since June 1940, and 9 tons of sodium uranate, the basis for the product called yellowcake, turned up in a boxcar in Le Havre. Laboratory glassware he purchased from a pharmacy that was going out of business. In the summer of 1947 construction began on a small reactor, the sort with which Goldschmidt and Kowarski had extensive experience. Kowarski, who liked naming machines, called the pile Zoe. Goldschmidt, using the Moroccan uranium oxide, prepared its fuel.

Zoe went critical on 15 December 1948. Kowarski had the honor of pressing the button that sent heavy water into the machine. ‘Of course,’ Goldschmidt wrote later, ‘no one could see anything, because everything took place behind the shielding provided by a thick concrete cube, several meters on each side, located at the center of a kind of shed.’ Joliot-Curie kept track of the measurements. Zoe would be put to use producing radioisotopes for research. The French program quickly expanded thereafter, with more funding and other reactors. It turned out that there was naturally occurring uranium in France, which supplemented supplies from Africa. Goldschmidt teased out the first milligram of plutonium late in 1949. Joliot-Curie had renounced the creation and use of nuclear weapons, but his open embrace of communism made him an increasing liability in France’s relations with the West, and, in the aftermath of Klaus Fuchs’s arrest in Britain in early 1950, Joliot-Curie was dismissed as head of the CEA.

Building a nuclear weapon was a related but different matter. Leslie Groves had long doubted that the French could build bombs: when he asked an American engineer about French prospects (‘How about the Frogs?’), he was told that ‘you can never get two Frenchmen to agree’, so it would be ‘damn near eternity’ before the French would have the necessary reactors up and running. Perrin, who succeeded Joliot-Curie as head of the CEA, was no more enthusiastic about nuclear weapons than his predecessor. Such high-level doubt left weapons’ work ‘only a drawing board project’ in the early 1950s, according to the CIA. Still, a 1946 poll had revealed that a majority of French citizens wanted their scientists to make nuclear weapons. De Gaulle believed, as Spencer Weart has noted, ‘that a country without nuclear weapons would not be taken seriously’, and in 1954 Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, smarting over the imminent loss of Indochina, declared: ‘A country is nothing without nuclear armaments.’ He thereupon authorized a program to build a weapon, a decision accelerated by the French, British, and Israeli rebuke at Suez in 1956 and affirmed by de Gaulle when he became premier in 1958. De Gaulle wanted France to have an independent military force, called force defrappe, that would include nuclear weapons. The CIA now reported that ‘most French political parties have taken the position that atomic armament is a necessary condition of independence’. Bombs conferred status, and the French craved status. By 1960 creation of nuclear weapons came second in the French military budget, trailing only funding for the suppression of the Algerian revolt. ‘Admission to the “nuclear club” is a symbol in French eyes of immediate parity with the other nuclear powers,’ concluded US intelligence. France tested its first bomb, a 70-kiloton plutonium weapon, at the Reganne Oasis in Algeria in February i960.5

3. Israel: Security and status

The French were willing to share their nuclear knowledge with others, and once Joliot-Curie had been sacked it became easier to accept French help without fear of seeming to embrace some side project of the Comintern. Perhaps the chief beneficiary of French openhandedness was Israel. Born into conflict, Israel