General Groves explains (in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project) the problem of the French scientists:
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.
[…]
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.
[…]
Upon his return to London, von Halban was closely questioned by my agents about his discussions with Joliot and it became obvious, as we had expected, that he had not held the conversation within the bounds of any “barest outline.” Vital information relating to our research had been disclosed—information that had been developed by Americans with American money, and that had been given to the British only in accordance with interchange agreements subsidiary to the Quebec Agreement. It confirmed facts that Joliot might have suspected, but which he otherwise could not have known. This information had always been scrupulously regarded as top secret.
[…]
Having effected a breach in the Quebec Agreement, Joliot proceeded to exploit it. He met with the Chancellor in February, 1945, and made it clear to Sir John that, while France had no immediate desire to press the issue, if she were not eventually admitted to full collaboration with the United States and Britain in the project, she would have to turn to Russia.
Thus, France acquired a bargaining power out of all proportion to anything to which her early patents entitled her. She was enabled to play power politics with our accomplishments and to bring, or threaten to bring, Russia into the picture. The United States was forced to sit quietly by while a large measure of the military security that we had gone to such pains to maintain was endangered and prematurely compromised by the actions of other governments over which we had no control.
In May of 1945, the French Government instructed Joliot to begin work on an atomic energy project. Joliot turned to his colleague, Pierre Auger, who had been working in the Montreal laboratories. Anticipating our concern, the British hastened to assure us that Auger would not participate in the actual work, but would limit his activities strictly to putting the French back on the right line if they made any serious errors. While Dr. Chadwick and I were both confident of Auger’s integrity, we realized that naturally his greatest loyalty was to his own country.
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My sole source of satisfaction in this affair came from a remark made by Joliot to an employee of the United States Embassy in Paris: while the British had always been most cordial to him and had given him much information, he said, he got virtually nothing from the Americans he encountered.
A devoted communist, Joliot Curie was purged in 1950. The British Communist Party had a lot of clout in Britain, and the foreign scientists on the Manhatten Project were sympathetic. This was a lot bigger than Klaus Fuchs. This was a long-term program to give Stalin the Bomb.
Good old Americans, like good old Dr. Ver… no, that was the next time.
Like good old Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and John Von Neumann. If this was not the greatest brain-drain in all the written history, what was?
Bruce says:
Yes, but that’s still following the stage magician’s pointing hand.
Considering hobbies of Oppenheimer and perhaps everyone who was anyone in Berkeley — and why would it be only Berkeley? — it was both a lot bigger and a lot closer.