Bertrand Goldschmidt

Bertrand Goldschmidt was a French chemist, born November 2, 1912 in Paris and died June 11, 2002 in the same city, remembered as one of the founding figures of the French nuclear program. Recruited to Marie Curie's Radium Institute in 1933 at the age of twenty, he became in 1942 the only French citizen to work on the Manhattan Project on American soil, joining Columbia University at Enrico Fermi's invitation to help develop the PUREX process for separating plutonium and extracting the first gram of plutonium ever produced, at the Chicago Pile-1 reactor; he then worked on Canada's first nuclear reactor at the Montreal Laboratory, commissioned in September 1945. That same year he helped found France's Atomic Energy Commission, the CEA, and led its chemistry department until 1960, personally directing the November 1949 extraction of plutonium from the spent fuel of France's Zoe reactor, work that fed directly into the plutonium used in France's first nuclear weapon test, Operation Gerboise Bleue, in 1960. He negotiated the establishment of Israel's Dimona nuclear facility between 1956 and 1957, represented France on the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors from 1958 to 1980, and wrote extensively on the history of nuclear energy.