Bertrand Goldschmidt

Bertrand Goldschmidt was a French nuclear chemist who served during World War II with American nuclear researchers, becoming an expert in the chemistry of plutonium and plutonium extraction. He chose to return to France after the war and joined its Atomic Energy Commission. Goldschmidt was among the few outsiders permitted to visit the completed reactor at Dimona in the 1960s.¹

Goldschmidt had strong emotional ties to Israel, heightened by his marriage into the Rothschild banking family, known for their contributions to Israeli and Jewish causes. He and his wife visited Israel in the early 1950s and met David Ben-Gurion through Ernst David Bergmann. As director of chemistry for France's Atomic Energy Commission, he later became a respected spokesman on nonproliferation issues.¹

Goldschmidt vividly recalled a meeting of the French Atomic Energy Commission where Ernst David Bergmann and Shimon Peres requested to buy a heavy-water research reactor similar to the one Canada was building in India. He remained convinced that the basic decision to help Israel get the bomb was made during these meetings in mid-September, before the Suez Crisis.¹