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ABSTRACT
By the 1960s, French uranium geologists were prospecting on every continent. This paper considers the link between this form of ‘nuclear reach’ and the weapons tests, reactor sales, and scientific exchanges that characterised the French programme. The shifting status of uranium during the early nuclear age and the prospection of uranium by French geologists reveals much about the evolving ambitions of the French nuclear leadership. Geophysics and ore concentration, alongside nucleonics and reactor design, were lynchpin techniques of this era, and the diplomatic and commercial stakes involved were central to the calculations of the French nuclear leadership.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Benoît Pelopidas for his kind invitation to join the section “French nuclear history and politics” of this issue of Cold War History and his enthusiastic support throughout the writing and revision of this article. I would also like to thank Sezin Topçu and Roberto Cantoni for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this article. I am as well very grateful for the insightful comments of the two anonymous referees--their feedback led to a greatly improved final paper. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support of the November 2018 Nuclear Knowledges workshop on French nuclear histories and politics at Sciences Po (CERI).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See Anna Konieczna’s “Nuclear twins: French-South African strategic cooperation (1964–79)” Cold War History, no. 3 (2021).
2 In Anna Konieczna’s article, importantly, the countries involved are not les Grands of the early nuclear age, but emerging nuclear powers, France’s relationships with which reveal the nature of its programme’s ambitions. See the series La France Nucléaire: Bilan et Perspectives, https://ind01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencespo.fr%2Fceri%2Ffr%2Fcontent%2Fl-histoire-nucleaire-de-la-france-bilan-et-perspectives&data=02%7C01%7Csathyan.dhanasekaran%40integra.co.in%7C01b373063d9641e787cd08d84378ca5e%7C70e2bc386b4b43a19821a49c0a744f3d%7C0%7C0%7C637333533377456835&sdata=9Sl%2Fua9iao29L%2BahbYe1fTxiYshkpAk5TM5p8f9l0QQ%3D&reserved=0, (accessed August 18, 2020). as well as Jayita Sarkar, “‘Wean Them Away From French Tutelage’: Franco-Indian Nuclear Relations and Anglo-American Anxieties During the Early Cold War, 1948–1952,” Cold War History 15, no. 3 (2015): 374–94. For another example of a case where prospection and mining of nuclear minerals had geopolitical consequences, see Jacob M. Van Splunter, “Strategic Minerals and Decolonization: The United States and Great Britain versus the Netherlands, 1945–1951,” The International History Review 17, no. 3 (1995): 485–511.
3 Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). This literature on the history of uranium acquisition in the nuclear age is bookended by John Helmreich’s study of the Anglo-American attempt to control uranium circulation at the onset of the Cold War, Gathering Rare Ores (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
4 In the literature on nuclear France, with the exception of Gabrielle Hecht’s work (the aim of which is wider than a reassessment of French nuclear history) and the work of sociologist Philippe Brunet, La nature dans tous ses états: uranium, nucléaire et radioactivité en Limousin (Presses Universitaire de Limoges et du Limousin, 2004), accounts of uranium exploration and mining tend to be internalist, written by former participants and their co-workers. See Antoine Paucard, La mine et les mineurs de l’uranium français (3 vols, Paris: Editions Thierry Parquet, 1992, 1994, 1996); Pierre-Christian Guiollard et al., L’Uranium de La Crouzille (Haute-Vienne) (1998), L’Uranium du Lodévois (Hérault) (1999), L’Uranium du Morvan et du Forez (2002), L’Uranium de deux ‘Privées’ de Jouac (Haute-Vienne) à Bertholène (Aveyron) en passant par Saint-Pierre (Cantal) (2003), and Le MAC Etablissement de Limoges (2005) (All Editions Saint-Pourçain-sur-Sioule: Pierre-Christian Guiollard). For a history of the next step in the fuel cycle, see Robert Bodu, Les secrets des cuves d’attaque: 40 ans de traitement des minerais d’uranium (Cogéma, 1994). For a more recent view of the environmental risk assessments made of the French mines, see Sophie Bretesché and Marie Ponnet, “Le risque au défi de la mémoire organisée: l’exemple de la gestion des mines d’uranium françaises,” VertigO – la revue électronique en sciences de l’environnement 12, no. 1 (May 2012).
5 Hecht provides a fascinating account of such work in Being Nuclear, pp. 341–50. See also Matthew Adamson, Lino Camprubí, and Simone Turchetti, “From the Ground Up: Uranium Surveillance and Atomic Energy in Western Europe, 1945–1960,” in The Surveillance Imperative: Geosciences during the Cold War and Beyond, ed. Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 23–44.
6 One might refer to any of Goldschmidt’s works, but most especially The Atomic Complex, where he comments several times on the global impact of various uranium discoveries, including on the French nuclear programme. Bertrand Goldschmidt, The Atomic Complex: A Worldwide Political History of Nuclear Energy (trans. Bruce Adkins) (La Grange Park, IL: American Nuclear Society, 1982), 108–9, 241–2, 284–6.
7 Ordonnance no. 45–2563, 30 Octobre 1945, Journal Officiel (31 October 1945): 7065–6.
8 Pitchblende is a massive dark brown or black form of the mineral uraninite, especially rich in uranium.
9 See, FAR-2006-10-12: Roubault to Dautry, 24 October 1950; Dautry to Lescop (Secretary General), 28 October 1950; Procès Verbal du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 8 November 1950; FAR-2006-10-12, Guéron to Lescop, 24 January 1951; Guéron to Lescop, 24 January 1951; Roubault to Lescop, 31 January 1951; Roubault to Dautry, 31 January 1951; Dautry to Lescop, 1 February 1951: all Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (hereafter Fontenay-aux-Roses, France: CEA).
10 The first expression of uranium in the Metropole as a sort of strategic reserve came during an April 1947 meeting of the CEA steering committee. Procès verbal du Comité de l’énergie atomique, 23 April 1947, CEA.
11 R.D. Nininger, “Geologic Distribution of Nuclear Raw Materials,” 1958 Geneva Conference.
12 For a detailed history, see Robert Bodu, Les secrets des cuves d’attaque: 40 ans de traitement des minerais d’uranium (Cogéma, 1994). Significantly, the plant at Gueugnon was soon adopted to handle the semi-concentrates from Gabon.
13 Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 10.
14 Procès-Verbal du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 8 November 1951, CEA.
15 Roberto Cantoni, Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War: the Enemy Underground (Taylor & Francis, 2017). See also Hecht, Being Nuclear, and John Krige, “Hybrid Knowledge: the Transnational Co-production of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the 1960s,” British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012): 337–58. For other essays on transnational and contested flows of technology, see also Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). For a recent account of how petroleum exploration and acquisition influence today’s polities, see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso Books, 2011).
16 Helmreich, Gathering Rare Ores.
17 As well as the French occupation zone in Germany. See Compte-Rendu du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 14 February 1946, report of geologist André Lenoble, CEA.
18 Compte-rendu du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 5 April 1946, CEA.
19 See Frank Woods McQuiston, Jr., “Metallurgist for Newmont Mining Corporation and US Atomic Energy Commission, 1934–1982,” an oral history conducted in 1986 and 1987 by Eleanor Swent, Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1989.
20 See Adamson, Camprubí, and Turchetti, “From the Ground Up.”
21 Note pour le Président Schuman, 5 May 1952, Maroc 1956–1968, 419. Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve (hereafter AD).
22 Bulletin Officiel (Rabat) 29 May 1953, 18–21.
23 The various levels of and reasons for secrecy involved in the affair are described in Matthew Adamson, “Les liaisons dangereuses: Resource Surveillance, Uranium Diplomacy and Secret French–American Collaboration in 1950s Morocco,” The British Journal for the History of Science 49, no. 1 (2016): 79–105.
24 I have not yet been able to access SOMAREM field reports. However, they are carefully described and analysed in the work of John Shepherd, an Australian geologist who served as IAEA uranium geology expert in Morocco in 1970–71. See especially, Box 19410 Folder Raw Materials Prospection (TA MOR 3 002), IAEA, Vienna (hereafter IAEA).
25 Martin Thomas, “Defending a Lost Cause? France and the United States Vision of Imperial Rule in French North Africa, 1945–1956,” Diplomatic History 26, no. 2 (2002): 215–47 (228).
26 US diplomats in Rabat and Tunis recommended not yielding to the French, but taking a stronger position; in the end, Dulles acted against their recommendations and voted against inscription. See Egya N. Sangmuah, “Sultan Mohammed ben Youssef’s American Strategy and the Diplomacy of North African Liberation, 1943–1961,” Journal of Contemporary History 27, no. 1 (1992): 129–48 (141–2).
27 Yahia H. Zoubir, “The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Decolonization of the Maghreb, 1945–1962,” Middle Eastern Studies 31, no. 1 (1995): 58–84.
28 In addition, the CEA’s top uranium geologists and engineers were invited on a three-week American tour, starting at USAEC headquarters in Washington and ending at the Colorado Plateau, where DREM director Jacques Mabile and others observed numerous sedimentary deposits, as well as the efficacy of private mining operations.
29 Adamson, “Les liaisons dangereuses,” 99–105.
30 Mara Drogan, “The Nuclear Imperative: Atoms for Peace and the Development of US Policy,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 5 (2016): 948–74. See also Helmreich, Gathering Rare Ores, and Richard Hewlett and Jack Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
31 Hecht, The Radiance of France; Dominique Mongin, La bombe atomique française, 1945–1958 (Brussels: Bruylant, 1997).
32 There was a parallel institution for nuclear engineering, INSTN at Saclay – l’Institut National des Sciences et Techniques Nucléaires – founded at the same time.
33 The other grands ouvrages besides the DREM were the three industrial-scale graphite-moderated reactors; EL3, the most powerful of the CEA’s research reactors; the Saturne synchrotron; and the naval vessel reactor project. Pierre Guillaumat in the Procès verbal du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 6 June 1957, CEA.
34 Jacques Mabile, 1961, Approvisionnement en matières premières atomiques de la République Française et de la Communauté, Box 281, AD; Procès verbal du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 6 October 1960, CEA.
35 Hecht, The Radiance of France.
36 “Les Relations Etrangères du Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique,” 1958, DRI M4.13.40, CEA.
37 “Les Relations Etrangères du Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique.”
38 In addition, before CEA experts went abroad, they customarily trained for several weeks at the Centre de Formation des Experts de la Cooperation Technique Internationale (est. 1957), where they were schooled in the institutions and economics of ‘development’, in a language that has since been greatly problematised by scholars.
39 Such recommendations had then to go through the Director General and the country making the request. Nevertheless, the record shows that the CEA often placed its experts in countries where it hoped for a strategic advantage.
40 Mission 1959 – Rapport Gerstner, FAR-2008-22-65 Relations avec le Brésil, 1954, 1957–1963, CEA.
41 Jean Lecoq, head of the CEA’s prospecting division, wrote to the head of its office of external affairs that Gerstner ‘appears to me perfect to serve as informer and assure connections at the personal level … Gerstner’s authority, which was convincing to Brazil during his first mission, can only help but serve the prestige of the Commissariat and French techniques.’ Jean LeCoq to Jean Renou, 19 January 1961, FAR-2008-22-67, Relations avec Brésil, 1951–1963, CEA.
42 See Nuclear Raw Materials, TA-BRA-12, IAEA.
43 Carlos Gonçalves to U.L. Goswami, 26 May 1961, TA-BRA-12, IAEA.
44 André Gerstner to U.L. Goswami, 12 June 1961, TA-BRA-12, IAEA.
45 André Gerstner, “Nuclear Raw Materials: Report to the Government of Brazil,” 17 November 1962, TA Report No. 64, IAEA.
46 André Gerstner, “Nuclear Raw Materials: Report to the Government of Brazil,” 17 November 1962, TA Report No. 64, IAEA.
47 See most recently, Maurice Vaïsse, ed., De Gaulle et l’Amérique Latine (Rennes: Presses universitaire de Rennes, 2017).
48 Paul Birien to Paris, 15 May 1962, FAR 2006–119-175, Relations avec le Brésil, 1961–1963, CEA.
49 Especially with Blangy’s appearance in Brazil, there is a historical phenomenon that curiously resembles what Sarah B. Pritchard describes as French hydroimperialism/hydrocapitalism. In the case given here, a technique gained in a protectorate, returned and perfected in France, is then exported to another country. See Sara B. Pritchard, “From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond,” Social Studies of Science 42, no. 4 (2012): 591–615.
50 Louis Peffau to Jean Renou, 16 January 1964, “Synthèse de la coopération France Brésil en 1963,” Relations avec le Brésil, 1962–1964, FAR-2008-19-3, CEA.
51 Communiqué Franco-Brésilien, 13–16 October 1964, 1089 Inva 243 Brésil, AD.
52 Personal communication with Carlo Patti, 25 February 2019. See also Carlo Patti, “Origins and Evolution of the Brazilian Nuclear Program (1947–2011),” Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Centre (2012).
53 US interests scored some success as well, with Westinghouse winning a contract in 1971 to build a 600 MW pressurised water reactor.
54 Examples from Goldschmidt’s presentation before the CEA steering committee, Procès Verbal du Comité de l’Energie Atomique, 2 March 1961, CEA.
55 Note that, importantly, Western Europe doubled its net energy imports from the 1950s to 1965, and its dependence on imports went from 7.9% of its energy to 51.2%, mostly due to an increase in oil imports. See J.A. Hassan and A. Duncan, “Integrating Energy: the Problems of Developing an Energy Policy in the European Communities, 1945–1980,” Journal of European Economic History 23, no. 1 (1994): 159–76 (162).
56 See Anna Konieczna’s “Nuclear twins.” (FN 1).
57 See Hecht, Radiance, 344. In fact, when in his June 2006 address concerning French vital interests Jacques Chirac included ‘les approvisionnements stratégiques’, we glimpse uranium, and the naturalisation of international exploration to secure it and influence its transnational circulation. Benoît Pelopidas, “French Nuclear Idiosyncrasy: How it Affects French Nuclear Policies Towards the United Arab Emirates and Iran,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 25, no. 1 (2012): 143–69 (148).
58 Sezin Topçu, La France nucléaire: L’art de gouverner une technologie contestée (Seuil, 2013). See esp. Chapter 9.
59 Cantoni, Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War. See especially the introduction.
60 For more on the disconnect between the Gaullist grand design and actual decisions about French nuclear policy, see Benoît Pélopidas and Sébastien Philippe’s “Unfit for Purpose: Reassessing the Development and Deployment of French Nuclear Weapons (1956–1974)” Cold War History, no. 3 (2021).
61 Dominique Pestre, “Debates in Transnational and Science Studies: a Defence and Illustration of the Virtues of Intellectual Tolerance,” The British Journal for the History of Science 45, no. 3 (2012): 425–42.
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Matthew Adamson
Matthew Adamson is presently Director of Academic and Student Affairs at McDaniel College's campus in Budapest, Hungary. His research interests include the history of science diplomacy as well as the first years of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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