This text is part of the special section 100 years of Acfas
Very few walkers on the campus of the University of Montreal know that the establishment has concealed a laboratory with secret activities. During the Second World War, it was by a competition circumstance that a team of international researchers is assembled in Montreal to win the bomb race atomic. An unusual scientific adventure that will mark the geopolitical and industrial history of Canada.
In 1942, Austrian-born French physicist Hans Halban left England for Montreal to set up a nuclear physics laboratory, the fruit of an agreement between the Americans and the British. The objective of the latter is urgent: it is necessary to manage to manufacture an atomic bomb before the Germans, and for that, it is necessary to produce fissile material. The researcher quickly recruited Quebecer Pierre Demers (with whom he worked in the Parisian Joliot-Curie laboratory) because of his knowledge of radioactive elements.
The bomb race
At the time, several projects were in competition, in particular the German Uranium project and the American Manhattan project. In the United Kingdom, the Tube Alloys initiative (which brings together international researchers, including French refugees) has to move because of the bombings and the lack of means. “Montreal was far from the war and close to natural resources, because the country had uranium mines and a heavy water manufacturing plant,” says Gilles Sabourin, nuclear engineer and author of the book Montreal and the bomb.
In addition to offering English and American allies neutral ground in Canada, the Quebec metropolis quickly established itself for its discreet character. After a brief installation at McGill University, the project finds its place at the University of Montreal. “The campus was under construction. There was nobody ! says Yves Gingras, historian and sociologist of science at the University of Quebec in Montreal, who also underlines the cultural openness of the city at the time. “The lab employed a lot of Europeans and very few Canadians. However, Montreal was already multi-ethnic,” he says.
“When we examine the telephone directories of the time, we see that the employees indicated that they worked for the National Research Council Canada,” observes Gilles Sabourin. They were prohibited from disclosing the existence and activities of the laboratory, which was highly compartmentalized. “Chemists, for example, didn’t know what others were doing and most employees didn’t know what the research was for,” explains the engineer.
For Yves Gingras, the secret was nevertheless betrayed by a newspaper of the time: the Montreal Morning. “We can read there that 60 foreign scholars are coming to settle at the University of Montreal to pursue extremely important research,” he exclaims, pointing to the box. According to the historian, there is no doubt that spies who would have read the latter would have “decoded” it.
A defining adventure
It was ultimately the Manhattan Project (a team more than 100 times larger than that of Montreal) that produced the bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A drama that caused an earthquake in the scientific community in the United States, but also in the secret laboratory team. “I have in my hands a document that has never been made public. Scientists from the Montreal laboratory demand that all nuclear weapons be placed under the control of the UN or an international group, to avoid the arms race,” says Gilles Sabourin.
The Canadian project nevertheless had major geopolitical and industrial fallout. “The work of the laboratory led to the creation of the CANDU (Canada deuterium uranium) reactor by its successor, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. Canada has thus become the second largest nuclear industry after the United States in the 1950s,” underlines Yves Gingras. The country is also becoming a leader in the production of radioactive isotopes, used in particular in the health sector, in nuclear medicine.
At the end of the war, the Montreal laboratory moved to Chalk River, Ontario, where Pierre Demers helped develop the first nuclear reactor. He also taught in the Department of Physics at the University of Montreal until 1980 and ardently defended the use of French as a scientific language. At that time, like Pierre Demers, some pursued brilliant careers, but others had a more tumultuous destiny. “The Cold War broke out because of the Montreal laboratory,” says Yves Gingras about the “Gouzenko affair”, named after a Russian spy at the Ottawa embassy. “He defected and revealed to the Canadian government that the Montreal laboratory was full of spies in the pay of the Russians,” he says.
But that’s another story.