Now It Can Be Told by General Leslie R. Groves

Author:General Leslie R. Groves [LESLIE R. GROVES AND EDWARD TELLER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2012-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16

THE PROBLEM OF THE FRENCH SCIENTISTS

After Joliot’s initial interrogations in England by Alsos agents, he returned to London on a number of visits and met occasionally with Sir John Anderson, who, by that time, had become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sometime in November of 1944, Joliot discussed atomic energy and France’s position in this field with General de Gaulle. Shortly after this we learned with dismay how much knowledge Joliot had managed to acquire of our own atomic effort.

The circumstances that made this possible go back to 1939, when a group of French scientists, working under Joliot’s leadership, had patented a number of inventions that they claimed would provide means for controlling the energy of the uranium atom. They assigned their rights in these patents to the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, an agency of the French Government.

One of Joliot’s assistants in this work was Hans von Halban. In June of 1940, when France was collapsing under the German onslaught, von Halban had left for England, taking with him the entire French supply of heavy water, a number of scientific papers, and a verbal commission from Joliot to act for the Centre in attempting to obtain the best possible terms to protect future French interests in the atomic field. He apparently engaged in prolonged negotiations with the British to this end, for it was not until September, 1942, that he finally entered into a formal agreement with representatives of the Committee of the Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Imperial Trust for the Encouragement of Scientific and Industrial Research.

Under the terms of the agreement, von Halban and Kowarski assigned to the British their own rights in the French patents and promised to ask Joliot to try to persuade the Centre to assign its collective rights as well. In return, the British would offer to the Centre certain rights in a series of other patents in this same field.

At the same time, the British employed von Halban and three of his associates from the Centre, eventually, as I have said, assigning them to the laboratories of the Tube Alloys Project in Montreal. By 1944, a number of other Centre scientists had left France to join the Free French Provisional Government in Algiers. The French working in the Montreal laboratories maintained contact with their former colleagues in North Africa and, through them, with their former leader, Joliot, who remained in Paris throughout the German occupation.

In August, 1943, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill signed the Quebec Agreement, one clause of which specifically stated: “that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.” Sir John Anderson was the British representative in drafting this agreement. As far as I could ever learn, neither he nor any other British representative mentioned the arrangement that was already in effect with the French through von Halban.

We first learned of the British-French arrangements when Sir John Anderson mentioned it in discussing with Ambassador Winant his desire to give certain information to the French.

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