Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Bertrand L. Goldschmidt

              PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES



ORAL HISTORY OF DR. BERTRAND GOLDSCHMIDT
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
December 7, 1983
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
 
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: …1912 and I had a brother very brilliant in mathematics. I was always told I wouldn’t succeed in mathematics as well as my brother so I decided not to do mathematics and I chose to do chemistry because I think when I was 12 or 13, I had a good note in chemistry and I didn’t, I graduated in the school called Ecole de Physique [inaudible] de Paris [School of Physics and Industrial Chemistry at Paris], which is a school where at the end of last century, Pierre Curie was a professor and it is in [inaudible] the court yard of that school that the Curies discovered radium but I had no intention to go toward radioactivity. It was decided from the beginning that I would do a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, the colors and the smells of organic compounds impacted me.
MR. LARSON: Yes, as I remember it, Dr. Goldschmidt, I believe [Otto] Hahn who did the work on radioactivity started out in organic chemistry also. It is a good place to start.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: No, I didn’t start in organic chemistry because a few weeks before I was graduating, the director of the school which was Paul Langevin was a long-life friend of Marie Curie, [inaudible] said that Madame Curie’s personal assistant in chemistry had a tragic accident, he had drown and she was looking for a man who had just graduated from school who would come and work with her. She had always chosen her assistants, her private assistants in that school where she had worked and where her husband had taught. [Inaudible] later got the Nobel Prize, also who came from that school. So that was in 1923 and I had an interview with her. Extremely intimidating. She looked very old, she was only 64 years old, but she looked much older, very frail. She didn’t have a white lab; she had a black lab coat. It gave her, her face was very pale and her hair was very white and she had a slight Polish accent still. She told me that I would be her slave for a year or two and then afterward and that is to show how mistakes can be done. She told me as Hitler was now in power and to submit which he had used to come to power would probably vanish in Germany and she was hoping by 1935 or ’36 to send me two years at the Laboratory of Ernichshmidt [sp?]. It wouldn’t matter because I am Jewish, they would send me to Ernichshmidt to do a very precise measure of the atomic mass of radium which is a very difficult job [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: So, doing a job like that on radium would have led to frightful overexposures.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Probably. In any case I had to do my military service in between ’33 and ’34. It was a one year military service and it was arranged that I would do part of it in a chemical warfare lab in Paris and go as often as I could, Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon to start learning from her. Soon I worked really very little with her. She taught me fractal crystallization, you know, it is the work she did to separate radium. Then, by early 1934, probably a few weeks after the discovery of artificial radioactivity by her daughter and son-in-law, Irene Joliot-Curie and Frederic, she fell ill and she passed away in July 1934. So when I finished my military service that following October ’34, I was taken exactly in the same conditions as personal assistant to André [Louis] Debierne, who was one of the last survivors of the discovery of radium. He had worked with the Curies since 1899 and had discovered actinium. So that is how I got involved in radioactivity, although I had never thought of being a specialist in that field. I must say that in those days the chemists in radioactive laboratories like the Curie Laboratory of Radium Institute in Paris was kind of second grade. The elite were the physicists. The chemists had to prepare sources for the physicists and one had the impression that all the work on identifying all these natural radioactive elements had already been done. Yes, there was, one work was done at that time, a little later the discovery of an enlargement which found element 87, that was, but apart from that there wasn’t much in chemistry. After one year of working with Debierne I was liberated to do a Ph.D. I did it on a kind of very benign subject which was the study in great detail of fractural crystallization of radium and barium salts, isomorphic crystals.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Of course at that particular time in 1932, it may have seemed quiescent, but of course I believe ’32 was when…
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: The discovery of the neutrons and artificial radioactivity…
MR. LARSON: Of course the invention of the cyclotron which gave new tools so the field was just right for exploitation.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Absolutely. I remember when I, sometime after I arrived at the laboratory, two very brilliant foreigners arrived. One was Hans Halbart who came from [inaudible] Laboratory in Copenhagen, and the other was [inaudible] who came from Fermi’s laboratory in [inaudible] and I had sort of a discussion with Halbart. I said that I was losing time doing work on something so outmoded, and I would tell him that his work, if he didn’t do it, on neutrons, somebody would do it a few weeks later. While I knew that what I was doing, if I didn’t do it perhaps nobody would ever do it. That was, once or twice, [inaudible] asked me to come work with them, but I felt that I had to keep faithful to the gentleman who had started me.
MR. LARSON: Fine. 
[Break in video]
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Madame [inaudible] was a Yugoslav Cosovich where they were in contradiction with the work that Hans [inaudible] was doing in Germany on the imitation of uranium by neutrons and really I think that one can say that it’s really Madame [inaudible]’s work that really put Hahn on the track of the discovery of fission, but it was really touch and go. She just missed the discovery herself. I remember all kinds of discussions on the certain element of [inaudible] five hours which was not what Hahn had suggested and which turned out finally to be I think atrium, an element of the amino classification. In any case, I was not at all mixed up with the work on the discovery of fission. However I remember being in the College of France in February 1940 when [inaudible] received a long, 140 word telegram of [inaudible] asking him to stop publishing in this field and he had also received a few days before a letter from [inaudible] and at that time there was such a rush on publications, that [inaudible] didn’t agree, and you know it was in March that he published, which [inaudible] discovery of the secondary neutrons followed a week later by Fermi and [Leo] Szilard. In any case, the war came and I was, the war found me in Tahiti. I had managed to do both a trip and a little bit of science at the same time. I had been given a mission which [inaudible] collaborators to measure large showers of cosmic rays in between on a great difference of latitude in between Marci and Tahiti. We were doing sole measure intake when we learned that the war had started. We were immobilized in Tahiti for two weeks. The only thing I did was to take about 150 young Tahitians singing behind me to look for ferns to make beds out of fern because there were not enough beds for the soldiers. So I was maintained that I was going to stay in the Army of the Pacific and then we were sent back, about 45 days to come back from [inaudible] abroad and we arrived in France, November ’39 and I learned I was sent to warfare gas laboratory in Perigueux which is in the south west of France checking on the validity of gas masks for various possible poison gases. In May 1940, I had a leave of a week and I was in Paris and Joliot asked me to come and see him. Joliot told me that the uranium work had taken great importance, a military importance, that he had been able to purchase in Norway the whole world-wide stock of heavy water, which was 185 kilos and that there was great prospect mainly in the direction of, production of energy, probably of an engine that could be used in a system. He asked me, he told me that he asked the Army to second me to his laboratory and I would be asked to study the extreme purification of uranium to element all the neutron capture uranium-230. This was exactly two days before the tenth of May when the Germans invaded Poland, [inaudible] and France. I never got my order to join Joliot’s laboratory in Paris and finally I was called, I was taken prisoner in Perigueux as well. I was only an uncommissioned officer, really no rank. There were 5,000 soldiers and uncommissioned officers which were taken prisoners in Perigueux. Out of those, there were 70 chemists working in that laboratory. Then the first miracle is that there are four cities in southwest France where the Germans released the prisoners after about 10 days. We never understood why, because when we were released we didn’t even realize that we were an exception. I did [inaudible] and I stayed until one of my colleagues who had been prisoner was going back to France, very nicely came back to Perigueux to tell us that he had seen prisoners still behind barbed wire in other camps and that we were an exception. So I, easily those days, the Germans hadn’t really prepared the separation between the two zones. About four in the morning from one zone to another and I went to Toulouse where I knew some colleagues of mine from the Curie laboratory must have been. There I saw a letter from Joliot saying that [inaudible] had left France and there was a convention name to say, with the heavy water. So I knew that that had been saved. 
MR. LARSON: That is a very interesting point there. How much heavy water were you able to get from Norway before the invasion?
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: You see, heavy water had been discovered by Harold Urey…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: …I think in 1934 and in Norway were there was very cheap electricity and there was a firm called Norse Heat [inaudible] it was a firm that essentially French capital. They had decided to produce heavy water by fractal electrolysis without any idea what it could be used for and they had produced 185 kilos which was the world-wide, the world stock, and the Germans sent in a mission at exactly the same time. You know, this is one of the great miracles of this war, is that independently the Germans and the French believed it would be easier to make a controlled production of energy, an engine for instance, than a bomb. The British and the Americans, the British had fission piles which were German-Jewish refugee scientists came to the opposite conclusion, that it would be easier to make an explosion and a bomb than an engine, and that is how probably we avoided the fact that the Germans, you see, that is why it didn’t have such a priority in Germany. They didn’t believe in the bomb and we didn’t believe in other thoughts.
MR. LARSON: That’s very interesting. I have had some discussions with the Navy people who were at the Naval Research Laboratory and their emphasis was at the time to use fission as a means of naval ship propulsion and they were very early overruled and that the direction was the direction of the bomb.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Oppenheimer had a part in that, as fission piles in England.
MR. LARSON: Yes. So that, it was very interesting that the Navy people were definitely involved in trying to use this for naval propulsion.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: So, my career continued in a funny way because by August 1940 it was said that all the civil servants who worked in Paris had to go to [inaudible] to get a permit to go back to Paris. Then I was luck, the minister of education in [inaudible], it was the first time in my life I had been asked the question, the director of the cabinet of the minister asked me, “I’m going to ask you a very discreet question. Are you Jewish?” I said, “Yes.” He said [inaudible] to give a job in occupied France to people who prefer to not go to Paris, to occupied France because of political, or other reasons. So I said alright [inaudible] is a nice city. I would be happy to spend some time in [inaudible] and I was promoted as assistant at the Faculty of Science at [inaudible]. At the same time, in Paris before the war, when my boss learned upon coming to Paris, he sent me a message, which hurt me very much at that time. It said this is the time of cowardice which would be bad for the future of your career. Now this was in September. A few weeks later in October, the government took a decision that all French, all Frenchmen of Jewish origin could not have certain kinds of civil servant positions in particular in teaching, and we were told that two months later we would lose our job. We were also told that we could not make a special exemption and that it would take years to study. Therefore we kept our jobs for three years with a demand like that. I think there were finally 10 exceptions in all of France. So by December, the end of December ’40, I was without a job and decided to do all I could to go to the States. Then again it’s luck. I went all the time in [inaudible] trying to get, the first thing you have to get is an exit permit. That I got through a friend who knew the Minister of the Interior, and then for getting an American visa was very difficult. Here again in America I met in [inaudible] a Spanish diplomat I knew because he met a French lady who was a friend of my family and he asked me out to lunch. Food wasn’t so easy and having a good lunch at a hotel in [inaudible] was not disagreeable. During lunch he said, “Are you trying to go away?” I said, “Yes.” He knew I lost my job and I said, “I’ve asked for a visa to America at the consulate in Marseille, but [inaudible].” He said, “You’re a lucky man. I know intimately the American consulate in Marseille and so he wrote a letter. The next day I went to Marseille, I took the letter and they immediately took it and few minutes letter I was in the consulate’s office. He was called [inaudible]. He told me, “You worked at the Curie laboratory. You will go to the States.” Then he asked me the following question, “Do you want a visitor’s visa, or a quota visa as an immigrant?” I was vexed, I said, “I’m not leaving France for good.” I said, “I’ll take the visitor’s visa.” He told me, “My boy, there are two things. The Germans win the war and you will never set foot in France, or the Germans will lose the war and when you come back to France, nobody will ask you if you had a visitor’s visa or an immigrant visa. I give you an immigrant visa because you need to earn your living in the States.” And so that is how, thanks to this gentleman, who was after the war, a general and I was able to thank a few years later. I left first to [inaudible] and that was going from France to France, and I would need my exit visit. Then after sometime in [inaudible] I was put in N-force residence because I was Jewish. Even in [inaudible] there were some difficulties, but that wasn’t too terrible. Then I managed to have a plane to Puerto Rico and then I arrived in New York, the end of May ’41. There immediately I thought it would be the best thing I could do was to try to do what Joliot had asked me to do, work on the uranium project. I knew obviously it was being studied in America too. So I went to the British Embassy in Washington because I had known before the war [inaudible] at the Paris Embassy, the British [inaudible] was Sir Charles Linderman who was the brother of the famous sir Frederick Linderman who became Lord [inaudible] who was the imminence and scientific advisor and a longtime friend of Churchill. So when I saw Charles and told him what I knew of the French uranium project and that Joliot had even planned to have me come and join the team, he told me, “You are surely needed in this country. Go back to your hotel and wait for, to be contacted.” A few days later I was asked, I got a message coming back, and there was a message in the hotel, “Please phone Professor Fermi at Columbia University.” I had met Fermi once or twice, so I was very excited. So I went to see Fermi and Szilard. I had lunch with them at the faculty club and I explained again what I had done and they told me they really needed me because one of their main problems was the purification of uranium. So, it was seemed that all my problems were solved and for all that summer while I was trying to learn as much as possible on uranium chemistry which I wasn’t so familiar and on the problem of how to eliminate the rare earth and doing book learning. It was always next week that I was going to start working with them. Then in September, late September ’41, [inaudible] called me and I remember very well it was a luncheon where it was Fermi, Szilard, and [inaudible] who was German and the three of them told me there was some bad news. “We must tell you that because you are French we can’t take you.” So I got a little curt. I said, “Listen, the three of you belong to other countries. I am from France and the only one who wore a uniform during this war. I was even prisoner for a few days.” It was impossible. I think at the same time Fermi had got more recognition and he had been asked not to take any more foreigners. It was not only the question of being French, but being told it was enough. He had too many foreigners and he must stop. So I was upset. I went to see the French office in New York and there they said the only other solution would be to try to find, to see if the British would take me. Then I was really losing my time. I had had an offer to work at the Memorial Hospital. It was [inaudible] who suggested it and for about, nearly six months I think I was employed in doing the radioactive measurements on terminal patients, the first terminal patients to whom I gave radio phosphorus by oral absorption.
MR. LARSON: Where was the radio phosphorus obtained?
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Oh, surely for cyclotrons.
MR. LARSON: Oh, cyclotrons.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Berkeley had a cyclotron. Joe Hamilton was doing the same work with radio iodine on patients, in California.
MR. LARSON: Yes. I have spoken to John Lawrence a friend of mine and he did a lot of work with radio phosphorus.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: So, by the end of April I was told that everything was solved and that I had been cured and the British took me. My first assignment, I was sent for two months at the Port Hope factory in Canada where radium was produced and uranium was purified. I spent two months as an advisor consultant on the radium extraction, not on uranium, but I was already able to see the work which was done in those days on uranium coming from Belgian Congo which was 70 percent in oxides. Absolutely [inaudible] that one has never found anywhere in the world since then and they were doing a kind of double precipitation by peroxide which was giving off already [inaudible] product. I have still a notebook at home that, in which I wrote, “Uranium oxide is sold at the price of $1.00 pound when one can sell it,” because uranium in those days was really a byproduct and difficult to sell as radium. So after two months in Port Hope I was called back to Washington and I was told that the group of Fermi and Szilard had moved, Fermi, Szilard, and his team had moved to Chicago and that I was going to be sent as the British representative to something called the Metallurgical Project in Chicago mainly to familiarize myself with the work done in chemistry there. So I arrived in mid-July in Chicago and I was received by the head of the Metallurgical Project, the very impressive Nobel Prize winner, Arthur Compton, with a lovely face, with his deep blue eyes and his gray hair. He was a lovely gentleman and he was very nice with me. Then he was the first man who mentioned that there was going to be, it was then that I learned that there was a bomb project. Even mentioned that it would take three years, that the first bomb would be for Japan and that if Germany wasn’t out of the war, was already determined that unconditional surrender had been decided the second bomb would be for Germany if they didn’t surrender unconditionally. He told me that as the British representative I would have access to all the different divisions, but he preferred I didn’t because there was this compartmentalization. He preferred me to stick to chemistry and that I was there to learn for the British all about plutonium chemistry. I had never heard of plutonium chemistry and he explained to me what was plutonium and he added, “and the most thing you should learn is that plutonium fluoride is insoluble.” I was astonished. He said, “Yes, we feel that the Germans haven’t gotten a cyclotron powerful enough to use plutonium and therefore they will probably not be able to isolate plutonium and know its chemistry.” The chemistry cannot be deducted easily from the uranium or thorium chemistry. The fact that the transuranium behaves more like a rare earth than like uranium is something that they wouldn’t know and therefore was a big secret. 
MR. LARSON: That was about in July of 1942 which had just, almost coincidental with the formation of the Manhattan Project.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: It’s a little later because, you see, I was assigned to [Glenn] Seaborg. Seaborg was a few months older than me. He was just 30 years old. I was a few months younger and all the other men of his group, there was about 20, were under 25 years old. We were the two elderly…
MR. LARSON: The two elder statesman of the plutonium class.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: It was a fascinating time. I participated in the isolation of the first quarter milligram. There were four different batches of 300 pounds of uranium nitrate, which had been negated at the St. Louis cyclotron. I worked especially with Isadore Perlman who was really the deputy of Seaborg and we did work on the determination of long-lived fission poles. It was even [inaudible] because fission products were suppose to be dealt with by [inaudible] and he didn’t know, he wasn’t familiar with radioactivity so Seaborg had started before [inaudible] in this field and then it had been considered that Seaborg shouldn’t have done that work and for a few days it wasn’t clear if the work Perlman and I had done on determination of long-lived fission products. We identified the zirconium, the niobium, the technetium, the cerium, all these lasting stuff which later would be, cause difficulty, the fall out of the tests of which were difficult in the isolation of plutonium. So for some time it wasn’t even clear if our report would be published inside the metallurgical project.
MR. LARSON: That is an amazing story about this July, essentially a fraction of a milligram of plutonium to work with. I arrived in Berkeley in July of ’42 on the electromagnetic project and I was very astonished to find that roughly a milligram or two of the enriched U-235 available at that time, and both of us apparently that in three years we would have a bomb. So it’s…
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: We had split demand of these 350, 300 pounds of 150 kilos of uranium nitrate in four batches. Perlman and I, we had a batch and we were among the last ones, I think it was the last batch and we were gaining experience of the difficulty of the other ones. We would start shaking uranium nitrate in these big clumsy lead screens, it was complicated. When we had one time concentrated the thing in a single beaker of plutonium, there was a man called Truman P. Coleman who was terribly afraid of radioactivity and he was putting protection against radioactivity everywhere and one morning we arrived and we put our beaker in the cupboard and this Coleman had put lead bricks around it and the wooden plank had broken. The beaker had spilt and broken, fortunately on the Sunday issue of a Chicago Sun, and so we had to discern that this 100 pages of newspaper and we use to call it the newspaper extract. Finally we did uncover our share of plutonium. Then it was at that time that, I got rather friendly with Szilard and Szilard had told me his ideas. One of his ideas, when he learned I was working on long-lived fission products, he said, “You think one could prepare fine work,” we used to go and see the pile being built under the stands of the football, under the football stand in the university sport ground. Szilard said, “Do you think one could produce quickly enough fission products to throw them all over the Belgian Congo mine?” Because you remember it was the days when the Germans were at the doors of Alexandria and there was a risk that all of Africa would be overrun. You see, Szilard was a few years, a few steps ahead and he was already afraid that the Belgium Congo mine would fall in the hands of the Germans. Then I remember very well when I was told there were [inaudible] I was told that the Army was going to take over and Szilard was very unhappy. I remember that conversation with him and then another thing, it was at that time Pierre Jacquinot you know who was a great man [inaudible] in France who was probably the second best physicist in France after Joliot, and Pierre Jacquinot was a visiting professor. Compton had given him a job at the, he had left France and was a [inaudible] professor at the university. He was not involved in our project and Pierre Jacquinot asked me for dinner one day and said, “You’re going to meet the most intelligent man you will ever meet. And he’s probably joining your project, he’s not quite sure because he’s considered [inaudible] a leftist,” and he said, “The American’s say a radical,” and that was Robert Oppenheimer. That was the first time I ever met him. 
MR. LARSON: That’s very interesting. 
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: He was fascinating.
MR. LARSON: I had…
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: He had come to be interviewed by Groves to become the head of Los Alamos. 
MR. LARSON: Yes, when I was out at Berkeley, I of course worked both with, slightly with Robert Oppenheimer, but more closely with Frank Oppenheimer, his brother. I can always remember Frank Oppenheimer, he must have been working 18 to 20 hours a day. I had never known anyone who was so hard working on that project as Frank Oppenheimer, but…
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: [inaudible] was strange. I remember opening a letter I had gotten from Washington, from the British embassy in Washington asking me to make a report and I opened it. Seaborg said, “Perhaps we know how long are you staying with me.” So he read it at the same time as me over my shoulder, asking me to write a report when all I had seen in Canada [inaudible] on uranium production and this report should be written by hand, should not be typed in Chicago, so any of the Americans who had seen my report, it was too late, Seaborg knew about it.  In any case, by October, I learned to my great surprise that I was not going to join the British group in Cambridge, but that the British group directed by Halbart, the one who had left with heavy water, [inaudible] naturalized French by then who had left with the heavy water for England, the British group was coming to Canada to set, become a Canadian outfit working on the heavy water natural uranium chain reaction and located in Canada to be very closely linked with the metallurgical group in Chicago. I had met sometime before, passing through Chicago, Halbart who told me that I would probably not go to Cambridge. Halbart was still under the hopes of that the graphite uranium, natural uranium chain reaction would not work and that he would be the first one to have a divergent chain reaction. In any case, by the end of October, I was called to Ottawa just at the time that the English and the Canadians were signing the agreement to make a joint project. So it was, I was told that I wouldn’t be the head of the chemistry, I would be the deputy head of chemistry. The head of the chemistry was a very famous radio chemist, Austrian, called Fritz [inaudible] who did a lot of work on the radiochloride. He was a lovely gentleman. 
MR. LARSON: Who wrote the book [inaudible].
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Absolutely. He was sad not to get the Nobel Prize and so I was asked to look. It was decided that the lab would be in Montreal. I was sent to look for a place for the lab and curiously enough it’s by chance I was traveling by plane in between Montreal and New York next to a Frenchman who had been the head of scientific research in France, called [inaudible]. He was a refugee professor at the French University of Montreal. They had built an enormous university behind the mountain and the Depression hadn’t allowed them to transform the laboratories, or classrooms in half the building. He said, “There you have a building with the facilities already there. You can make a laboratory in three months,” and that’s what was done in between December ’42 and March ’43. Then something terrible happened in January ’43. Sir Wallace Acres who was head of the British project which was called by the strange code name of Tube Alloy Directory, came one day and said there was very bad news. “I have received a letter from [inaudible] and America wants to stop complete collaboration. Naturally we can’t compete with them in means and effort. They have a much greater number of scientists. The industry is much stronger, but to be fair we do the fighters, they do the bombers and there would be a sharing of the activity in this field.” But it seemed rather hopeless because the letter said that there would only be collaboration in fundamental science, no more in plutonium and U-235 production. I was, I had been nominated when I had left Chicago, I had been given a badge as consultant. And Pierre Jacquinot who had been designated to be the head of physics of the Anglo-Canadian group had been just before he’d left, also nominated on consultant on the metallurgical project. So we offered [inaudible], we said, “Listen, let’s tie. Let’s go down and see if we accept it, the project and let’s at least learn the last thing before there is an end of collaboration.” So we went down, there was an excuse to go back to Chicago because Jacquinot still had his family in Chicago and when I arrived I phoned Seaborg and he phoned Compton and he said, “You’re welcome. Come and see us tomorrow.” So independently we said we could not tell the truth, me to Seaborg, and Jacquinot to Compton and we said we’ve gone public for our last visit, but scientific interchange is going to stop between the Anglo-Canadian group and the American group. So Seaborg was very nice. He said, “Listen, you worked on a quarter of a quarter of a milligram that means about 75 micrograms, you isolated. I will give you four micrograms. So he gave me four micrograms of plutonium and a test tube of fission product, long-lived fission product because you see in Canada we had no cyclotron and we just had our heavy water. So I remember walking on the campus and meeting [inaudible] and said, “Hi, Goldschmidt,” and then he did like a customs man; he put his hand all over my body. He said, “I hope you’re not leaving empty handed. We won’t see you for a long time.” So that’s how I left Chicago with a few micrograms, which wasn’t very much. It wasn’t very useful, but it was amusing more than useful, but at that time, I was able to learn visiting my friends in Seaborg’s lab that a man called Stanley Thompson who is dead now. Stanley Thompson had discovered that bismuth phosphate carried down very well the plutonium and it was a very specific kind of precipitate and it was practically sure that this would be the method that America would use with oxidation reduction system. So I went back with Jacquinot to Canada. We were considered as heroes because we had, Jacquinot had brought back all the details of that lattice of the pile, he knew how much graphite, where the oxide and the metal had been located, so we came back with some last minute information and then the collaboration stopped. That was a very unpleasant time where we were in Montreal during the war having practically nothing to do. It was even something worse because going to Port Hope one day and seeing my, the head of the Port Hope factory I learned that the Americans had contracted all the Canadian uranium until 1947. So, I told that to Halbart because he was so upset. He said, “That’s not possible. It is our only asset to the negotiations with Americans,” and I went to see Acres in Ottawa and it took one month for the British to see that Leslie Howe who was the Canadian minister of supply had signed that contract. Then he didn’t know what it was. So that was, the Anglo-Canadians had no uranium, no heavy water which was built by the American Navy subsidies in Canada, but for the American Navy and no cyclotron. So we had nothing to do. Then as you know collaboration was the principle of, the restart of collaboration was done at the Quebec Conference in August 1943. I was the first to be involved in, and here again was something curious. In September ’43, after the Quebec Conference, [inaudible] and I were called to Chicago and we went to a meeting which was presided by, there was Fermi, I think was presided, by Fermi. There was Fermi. There was [Emilio] Segre down from California. There was somebody called Thomas who was an industrialist, chemist I think from Monsanto Chemical and about 15 people. We were read 20 questions about polonium and asked to answer what we knew: if one could produce polonium without light elements and questions like that. How strong is soft polonium? When it was finished, we answered more or less some questions because they were tricky. It was obvious to make a polonium and nitrous salts we guessed it was probably for the detonate of the bomb. When I asked if we could have the list of the questions, they hesitated to give them to us. I said that was a little exaggerated. I mean I could have learned them by heart, I could have written them. So finally I was allowed to bring back to Canada what we called the polonium quiz. Then a few weeks later I was called down to New York at the Gaines Memorial Hospital where I worked completely out of the project and I was given three grams of radium, of the only radium of the memorial hospital, to extract the polonium in those labs, the radium and polonium. Things were still very political because when the source was finished it was a query of polonium. I think it was the biggest source ever done at that time before one did polonium by artificial radiation.
MR. LARSON: And incidentally Monsanto was in charge. Charlie Thomas probably set that up.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Yes. So I was, I went back with the polonium source to Canada. By a blinding snowstorm, an American officer came, it was complicated because the train didn’t work, I had to go in the station, came to receive the polonium source and bring it to Los Alamos instead of having it delivered at New York, to go to Los Alamos, to Site Y as it was called. It had to come to Canada first because it was a contribution of the Anglo-Canadian outfit to the war project. Then early January 1944, we had an extraordinary meeting to start again collaboration and this meeting took place in Chicago, the sixth of January, 1944. I remember the date and we were 24, 12 of the Anglo-Canadian project, 12 of the American project, shared by General Groves and Sir James Chadwick who had discovered the neutron and out of these 24 men I figured out that there were 13 different nationalities at birth, to show that this was an international project.
MR. LARSON: That is amazing how all of the brains of all of these different countries are brought to bear on this one project. 
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: So, when the meeting started we were told that we were going to see what Canada, the Montreal outfit would do in relation with Chicago. But then there was a surprising thing, there was a kind of whispering between the two bosses, between Groves and Chadwick. Then I saw Chadwick getting very red in the face. Groves getting very red in the face and then they said, “We mustn’t quarrel in front of the children,” and then left the room. And then they came back and then they said there would be collaboration in the field of heavy water reactors with Chicago, that there would be collaboration on the thorium-uranium 233 project, but that there wouldn’t be any collaboration on plutonium. The reason was that in the Quebec agreement it was said that it would only be collaboration which was useful in pursuit of the war. The design, the planning of the Hanford plant for plutonium extraction was completely finalized and the Americans said if that plant is finalized the Anglo-Canadian can’t bring any information. Therefore the plutonium is out of information. I was very unhappy. It wasn’t going to be my field. I told Karkoff that I was going to resign and join the Army or join London, I don’t know what and Karkoff told me, “Goldschmidt, don’t worry.” I forgot to tell you that Karkoff had replaced by that time Halbart. Halbart hadn’t been very popular. He’d been very difficult man in difficult days and the Americans had given the argument on non-collaboration on the group was led in Canada by a former Austrian national. They wanted an Englishman and that’s how Sir John Karkoff came. Karkoff, when plutonium, it was decided that plutonium was out of collaboration [inaudible] if we can’t collaborate on plutonium. So there was a big negotiation which lasted all of the first months of ’44 and finally the last negotiation took place in June ’44, in a hotel in Chicago. I remember very well, I went down, and it’s the sixth of January ’44, no, I’m sorry, the sixth of June ’44, the day of the, the D-Day of invasion. The Americans gave in a little bit. The meeting was in between Groves, Chadwick, and Dean Mackenzie who was the head of the NRC, the National Research Council of Canada. They decided that there wouldn’t be collaboration, but that we would receive in Canada some irradiated slugs from the Oak Ridge pile containing plutonium and it was up to us to work out whatever method we wanted, but there wouldn’t be any interchanging neither in chemistry nor in industrial applications.
MR. LARSON: You had already of course learned of the small state…
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: I was in an extraordinary position because by pure geographical luck if I hadn’t been in America as opposed to another young man who had come from England and furthermore if the British had decided to send 10 chemists to Seaborg, they would have been welcome in July ’42. So I was the only one who had played with plutonium, so there was a very amusing thing. Lord Charles came over and he was a strange man with a somber face and I gave him a talk. He was in my little office and explained that there were two possibilities. I knew enough about the outline of the bismuth phosphate method to do, to try to reproduce the bismuth phosphate method and work it out. Or I said, Seaborg always said that solvent would be the best solution and we knew that some progress had been made on solvent extraction in the project, the electromagnetic project on the recovery of uranium in the electromagnetic enrichment project. So I told Charles that was the two choices. Either we find another field and try to see what we can do with solvents or we try to repeat the bismuth phosphate. Charles said very reasonably that there is all reason to hope that collaboration would start again at one stage and that for why not I do something original. On that meeting, he stayed on the little couch that I had in my office with his bowler hat on his head and his chin on [inaudible] and he hadn’t said a word just when he spoke on the conclusion. I felt like a child with a tremendously important man. So that’s how we started on solvent extraction. We began in 300 different solutions of carbon and carbide on the states and then shook a sample of the fission products with, by the way we received the slugs in the meantime, extracted a few milligrams of plutonium which was quite easy. Then we made a systematic study of these solvents and we chose one which was triglycol diethylene, we use to call trigly, which we worked without, we extracted better uranium than plutonium without oxygen reduction. We had a sorting out agent and this is really the first pilot plant of plutonium extraction and solvent which was built in Canada from 1946 on which was finished in ’49 which allowed the Canadians to produce 15 kilos of plutonium by the early ‘50’s. Therefore if should the Canadians had decided to make a bomb they could perhaps even have had a bomb before the British, but they didn’t decide. So in my case, I didn’t see the pilot plant because by October 1945, when, just a few weeks after the first zero pile had worked in Canada with heavy water and uranium metal both coming from the states, the pile had been built by [inaudible] who was the other colleague of Halbart with the heavy water from France, but this was quite a few tons of heavy water, under 185 kilos, Joliot sent to France, from France to ask us to come back. I forgot to tell you that in July ’44 we had learned that General [inaudible] was going to come to Ottawa and we had decided that Pierre Jacquinot and myself with a few Frenchmen working on the project, that [inaudible] should be warned. That was not quite in concordance with our secrecy committee. We felt that we were French and that we should tell the future, the present head of state of France of the existence of the pile. 
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting point because at that particular time even Truman who later became president did not know of the…
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: Absolutely. So we went to see the head of the French delegation in Ottawa. It was a man named [inaudible] and [inaudible] and we said that we want to make a communication to the General, but we can’t tell you what it is and we don’t want anyone else to be present. So he said that was very difficult and he said, “I can’t allow three of you to see the General alone. It should be one of you.” Of the three of us, the only one who knew the goal was [inaudible] another chemist. Then he said, “I will give you a quarter of an hour.” Then a few weeks later we heard that this quarter of an hour was only going to be six minutes and then it was only going to be three minutes. So we came to Ottawa the very day because finally the [inaudible] was only going to be three hours in Ottawa. That was the eleventh of July, 1944. He gave a big speech in front of parliament. It was a lovely day and then he went to visit the delegation, the free French delegation of Ottawa, which was held in a small villa and it was understood that when he would arrive he would ask the delegate [inaudible] he would say, “I would like to go and wash my hands.” [Inaudible] would tell him that you take the corridor and it’s the last door on the left and [inaudible] the last door on the left, but he was going to the last room on the right where [inaudible] was waiting for him and he said [inaudible] be quick. [Inaudible] said, “My General, we are working in Canada on a new field which is going to materialize by a revolution of a bomb which would be ready in one year from now. The first one will be for Japan and the second one would be for Germany. The whole of the war would depend on that. It would give the United States a tremendous power. We must start to gain in this field as quickly as we can. In France you must create an organization for that.” The only wrong thing we said, we said we must ask [inaudible] to be the leaders there and to the only wrong thing we said was you must be careful not to let the American’s and the British save Madagascar which you had liberated, or you had occupied because this is in the French Empire where they should be, uranium sources. This was a mistake. It wasn’t the case, and we naturally, [inaudible] and I had learned by [inaudible] and then when it was finished he was introduced to all of us and he came to me and for the first time in my life I was not called professor, I was called [inaudible] I understood very well. So then he, this is how [inaudible] was the first commission ever created in peace time only for atomic energy for the USA. It was created the eighteenth of October, ’45. So we were asked to come back in October and at that time the British said they wanted to keep me one year. So [inaudible] went back one year earlier, [inaudible] went back and I stayed behind as head of the chemistry of the whole Anglo-Canadian project, was not only in Montreal, but in [inaudible] where large heavy water uranium, natural uranium research reactor was being built. The famous NIX, in 1947, I was there to push this solvent extraction method at the pilot plant and I signed the first of January my contract for one year. The same day I was told by Karkoff that he had heard that there was bad news coming and the eighteenth of January I was told that I had to resign, that I couldn’t stay and the Americans had insisted that I shouldn’t stay because there was no relation with the French. That was the amusing side of it. I left Canada and went to Washington to see General Groves and I had met him two or three times, once on a visit to Canada, he would always been quite friendly and he couldn’t have been nicer. He said, “Goldschmidt, there is nothing personal, there is no official relation in this field with France, but, and we wouldn’t even ask you to become an American, Canadian, or British national, but if you promise that you would stay five years in Canada, and you wouldn’t consider that you wouldn’t have any links with the French government we would keep you.” I said that was impossible. I had my [inaudible] in French and was [inaudible] by the French force and I belonged to my country. He added, “You see it is personal because there is another man in your case, but he’s not keen to go, he probably won’t go back to his country and we like him as much as we like you and we are keeping him.” It’s [inaudible] and if they treated [inaudible] like me they would have been better off as you know four years later [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: Yes. That was one of the amazing things in all of this intrigue and I had never heard that story before. This is a marvelous addition to history.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: So I went back and it was very amusing because I was, no there was a very interesting conversation because we had received, we had been told that we were not delete of our secrecy pledge. So I discussed that with [inaudible]. I said, “You can’t, you’re stopping our career. We were there, we were there to help during the war effort, and you can’t oblige us to announce working in atomic energy. The country needs us and in the same time it’s impossible for us to work and pretend we don’t know what we know.” Then he said, “Listen, I can’t put it in writing, but if you are reasonable enough, only to give the information when it is needed, then it wouldn’t make any harm.” That’s what we did and there was never any complaint. I saw many times in the last years of his life when he was a great friend of one of the heads of our magazines, [inaudible] and he would come and see him and I would often invited to dinner and I always had very good relations. I remember that charming smile that he had. I never saw an American scientist like him so much, but he was very nice to me apart from the fact that he had been obliged to ask my dismissal from Canada. So I would like to tell you just a little bit of the beginning of the French [inaudible] because there were one or two things amusing. First of all I was lucky to find a space on the first Constellation, TWA Constellation flight from New York to Paris. You know before that there was a seaplane. But the first commercial land plane going from New York to Paris left the fifth of February 1946. I even have a metal of that and I landed in Paris. I phoned [inaudible]. He said it’s amusing because the [inaudible] hadn’t seen yet [inaudible] because they had gone to winter sports and [inaudible] are giving a talk tomorrow, a little lecture to [inaudible]. So you should join us. So I opened the door to the little home [inaudible] in Paris, a quarter of an hour after the meeting had started and I said [inaudible] you could have waited for me and those people only thought I was arriving one year later. I did this at the beginning. So I was in charge of the French commission of all purification of uranium, doing the same thing. And the day that plutonium would be available, I would be in charge of plutonium. So, I remember what I promised to Groves, I ordered from Carbon and Carbide about 100 solvents. They weren’t the best ones, but I didn’t want to order only the good ones because I felt it was more honest. There was no work done on plutonium before ’49 where we extracted the first milligram, produced from the zero pile, but in 1950, you see in Canada I had two deputies. I had a Canadian deputy who became head of chemistry when I left and an English deputy who became head of chemistry in Harvard. That was a man called Bob [inaudible] who was later the head of [inaudible] and Bob came to Paris one day and he said [inaudible] we missed the best solvent. We missed the best solvent. I don’t know why. Either it wasn’t available, or we didn’t order it, it wasn’t very organic he said. I can’t tell you the name, it’s highly secret. The American’s have found a solvent much better than all the ones that we handled and the only thing; I said how did it get discovered. He said it was discovered quite accidentally not with atomic energy. But I absolutely can’t tell you what it is. So I had two girls put on it doing a very strict bibliography of everything that had been published in America on solvent extraction since the war. And about two months later, it took a lot of time, they said, “The only thing we’ve seen is this [inaudible] used for separation of the elements of the rare earth. Then they use a solvent called tributal phosphate. Have you heard of it?” I said I don’t think we ordered it, I don’t remember. A few days later the deputy of, the deputy head of chemistry of Harvard came to visit us in Paris and I took him by Carter, our nuclear establishment and I addressed not even looking at him, I said, “By the way, have you, are you also working on tributal phosphate?” He said, “You know?” And I said I knew. I hadn’t even ordered the stuff. That’s how we ordered tributal phosphate and worked it out quite well and were the first to publish it as we didn’t belong to the declassification group and were not consulted on what we could and could not publish at the first Geneva conference. That’s how we published the plutonium extraction by tributal phosphate in 1955.
MR. LARSON: Tributal phosphate was an absolutely amazing specific thing which, it’s one of these extraordinary accidents of chemistry and I can remember being informed of the properties of this in the test tube stage and I couldn’t believe it that it was so effective.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: And we never knew why we didn’t have it on our list of solvents and it was certain that we didn’t have it because we couldn’t have missed it. Once you shake it with uranium the way it takes out uranium. I don’t know. Did we find it not organic enough, I don’t know. 
MR. LARSON: Well that was an amazing incident there.
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: So I was telling you five months after having been removed by the Americans from the Anglo-Canadian outfit I was again the guest, this time of the American Navy because you know when there was a Bikini Test, the Navy was forced by the state department to invite two representatives [inaudible] security council and I was with a man from the French Navy. I was sent for France. It was fascinating because we were, it took place at the same time as the first meetings of the United Nations Commission, Atomic Energy United Nation Commission for the control of Atomic Energy. You remember the 14th of June there was the famous battle plan [inaudible] was proposed by [inaudible] and then at the same time there were the first discussions taking place in the UN with great success. You remember the great success was the military plan, it was half military, half UN. It still wasn’t, it was still used for some kind of military implement. We were on the Pacific on a Navy ship going to see the first test, which I think was the first of July and the second one was the twenty-fifth of July. Something like that.
MR. LARSON: Yes. Those were two amazing events. I think the coverage in all of the pictures that were taken startled the world. 
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: You know when I came back to Paris I was a bachelor. I wasn’t married yet. I didn’t have a meal where I wasn’t invited for about three months. I was wined and dined and asked to give talks everywhere. I was a hero. I was really famous and I mean there was such a prestige. [Inaudible] compared to the political drama over and over. The country over did it 28 years later, about 1000 tests later where the Indians blew up an underground device. Consider the publicity of the Bikini test and the political glamor of the Indian test; you can’t believe it’s the same material, the same physical experiment being done in two different places.
MR. LARSON: Essentially it’s a different world than it was. 
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT: It’s the same five kilos of plutonium that you put together. It’s a purely physical experiment. 
MR. LARSON: Yes. Well this is a fine; it brings us right up to essentially 1950 and the beginnings of the talks for Atoms for Peace. I was thinking, I was going to suggest that we perhaps might continue this conversation in Paris when I am over there. We will go to chapter two. 
DR. GOLDSCHIMDT:  I would love to do it. I will tell you how France became a nuclear power without any discussion in Parliament practically without any public discussion or any organized opposition. It was a matter of cause. This is again something which is difficult to understand today that the country could decide on a military nuclear program without considering it as something abnormal. 
MR. LARSON: That’s as they said a marvelous story in itself and as they say we’ve got to go on when I make this trip to Paris. We’ll go on to chapter…
[End of Interview]