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French Nuclear Weapons Testing
France is one of the five "Nuclear Weapons States" under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but is not known to possess or develop any chemical or biological weapons. France is the only member of the European Union to possess independent (non-NATO) nuclear weapons. France was the fourth country to test an independently developed nuclear weapon, doing so in 1960 under the government of Charles de Gaulle. The French military is currently thought to retain a weapons stockpile of around 290 operational (deployed) nuclear warheads, making it the fourth-largest in the world, speaking in terms of warheads, not megatons. The weapons are part of the country's ''Force de dissuasion'', developed in the late 1950s and 1960s to give France the ability to distance itself from NATO while having a means of nuclear deterrence under sovereign control. France did not sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which gave it the option to conduct further nuclear tests until it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlantic, North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and List of islands of France, many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean, giving it Exclusive economic zone of France, one of the largest discontiguous exclusive economic zones in the world. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north; Germany to the northeast; Switzerland to the east; Italy and Monaco to the southeast; Andorra and Spain to the south; and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the northwest. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea. Its Regions of France, eighteen integral regions—five of which are overseas—span a combined area of and hav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chemical Weapon
A chemical weapon (CW) is a specialized munition that uses chemicals formulated to inflict death or harm on humans. According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), this can be any chemical compound intended as a weapon "or its precursor that can cause death, injury, temporary incapacitation or sensory irritation through its chemical action. Munitions or other delivery devices designed to deliver chemical weapons, whether filled or unfilled, are also considered weapons themselves." Chemical weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), though they are distinct from nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and radiological weapons. All may be used in warfare and are known by the military acronym NBC (for nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare). Weapons of mass destruction are distinct from conventional weapons, which are primarily effective due to their explosive, kinetic, or incendiary potential. Chemical weapons can be widely ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Montreal Laboratory
The Montreal Laboratory was a program established by the National Research Council of Canada during World War II to undertake nuclear research in collaboration with the United Kingdom, and to absorb some of the scientists and work of the Tube Alloys nuclear project in Britain. It became part of the Manhattan Project, and designed and built some of the world's first nuclear reactors. After the Fall of France, some French scientists escaped to Britain with their stock of heavy water. They were temporarily installed in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where they worked on reactor design. The MAUD Committee was uncertain whether this was relevant to the main task of Tube Alloys, that of building an atomic bomb, although there remained a possibility that a reactor could be used to breed plutonium, which might be used in one. It therefore recommended that they be relocated to the United States, and co-located with the Manhattan Project's reactor effort. Due t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plutonium
Plutonium is a chemical element; it has symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is a silvery-gray actinide metal that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibits six allotropes and four oxidation states. It reacts with carbon, halogens, nitrogen, silicon, and hydrogen. When exposed to moist air, it forms oxides and hydrides that can expand the sample up to 70% in volume, which in turn flake off as a powder that is pyrophoric. It is radioactive and can accumulate in bones, which makes the handling of plutonium dangerous. Plutonium was first synthesized and isolated in late 1940 and early 1941, by deuteron bombardment of uranium-238 in the cyclotron at the University of California, Berkeley. First, neptunium-238 (half-life 2.1 days) was synthesized, which then beta-decayed to form the new element with atomic number 94 and atomic weight 238 (half-life 88 years). Since uranium had been named after the planet Uranus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bertrand Goldschmidt
Bertrand Goldschmidt (2 November 1912 – 11 June 2002) was a French chemist. He is considered one of the fathers of the French atomic bomb, which was tested for the first time in 1960 in the nuclear test Gerboise Bleue. Biography Bertrand Goldschmidt was born in Paris on 2 November 1912 to a French mother and a Belgian father of Jewish origin. He entered the Paris School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in 1932 and was recruited to the Radium Institute in 1933 by Marie Curie. He obtained his doctorate in 1939. During the Battle of France, Goldschmidt served in a military laboratory in Poitiers and was taken prisoner by the invading Germans. They later released him and he moved into the unoccupied zone. He taught for a short time in Montpellier, until the post-surrender Vichy government changed the status of Jews under pressure from the Germans. He then emigrated to the United States and arrived in New York City in May 1941, where he joined the Free French Forces. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Fourth Republic
The French Fourth Republic () was the republican government of France from 27 October 1946 to 4 October 1958, governed by the fourth republican constitution of 13 October 1946. Essentially a reestablishment and continuation of the French Third Republic which governed from 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War to 1940 during World War II, it suffered many of the same problems which led to its end. The French Fourth Republic was a parliamentary republic. Despite political dysfunction, the Fourth Republic saw an era of great economic growth in France and the rebuilding of the nation's social institutions and industry after World War II, with assistance from the United States through the Marshall Plan. It also saw the beginning of the rapprochement with France's longtime enemy Germany, which led to Franco-German co-operation and eventually to the European Union. The new constitution made some attempts to strengthen the executive branch of government to prevent the unstable situati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Smyth Report
The Smyth Report (officially ''Atomic Energy for Military Purposes'') is the common name of an administrative history written by American physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth about the Manhattan Project, the Allies of World War II, Allied effort to develop atomic bombs during World War II. The subtitle of the report is ''A General Account of the Development of Methods of Using Atomic Energy for Military Purposes''. It was released to the public on August 12, 1945, just days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Smyth was commissioned to write the report by Major General (United States), Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project. The Smyth Report was the first official account of the development of the atomic bombs and the basic physical processes behind them. It also served as an indication as to what information was Declassification, declassified; anything in the Smyth Report could be discussed openly. For this reason ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York Herald Tribune
The ''New York Herald Tribune'' was a newspaper published between 1924 and 1966. It was created in 1924 when Ogden Mills Reid of the '' New York Tribune'' acquired the '' New York Herald''. It was regarded as a "writer's newspaper" and competed with ''The New York Times'' in the daily morning market. The paper won twelve Pulitzer Prizes during its lifetime. A "Republican paper, a Protestant paper and a paper more representative of the suburbs than the ethnic mix of the city", according to one later reporter, the ''Tribune'' generally did not match the comprehensiveness of ''The New York Times'' coverage. Its national, international and business coverage, however, was generally viewed as among the best in the industry, as was its overall style. At one time or another, the paper's writers included Dorothy Thompson, Red Smith, Roger Kahn, Richard Watts Jr., Homer Bigart, Walter Kerr, Walter Lippmann, St. Clair McKelway, Judith Crist, Dick Schaap, Tom Wolfe, John Steinbec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
High Commissioner For Atomic Energy
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, or CEA ( French: Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives), is a French public government-funded research organisation in the areas of energy, defense and security, information technologies and health technologies. The CEA maintains a cross-disciplinary culture of engineers and researchers, building on the synergies between fundamental and technological research. CEA is headed by a board headed by the general administrator (currently François Jacq since 20 April 2018), advised by the high-commissioner for atomic energy (currently ). Its yearly budget amounts to €5.8 billion and its permanent staff is slightly over 21,000 persons. History CEA was created in 1945; since then, the successive high-commissioners have been Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Francis Perrin, , , Raoul Dautry, René Pellat, Bernard Bigot, Catherine Cesarsky, , and François Jacq. In December 2009, French President Nico ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frédéric Joliot-Curie
Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie (; ; 19 March 1900 – 14 August 1958) was a French chemist and physicist who received the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his wife, Irène Joliot-Curie, for their discovery of induced radioactivity. They were the second married couple, after his parents-in-law, to win the Nobel Prize, adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. Joliot-Curie and his wife also founded the Orsay Faculty of Sciences, part of the Paris-Saclay University. Biography Early years Born in Paris, France, Frédéric Joliot was a graduate of ESPCI Paris. In 1925 he became an assistant to Marie Curie, at the Radium Institute. He fell in love with her daughter Irène Curie, and soon after their marriage in 1926 they both changed their surnames to Joliot-Curie. At the insistence of Marie, Joliot-Curie obtained a second baccalauréat, a bachelor's degree, and a doctorate in science, doing his thesis on the electrochemistry of radio-elements. Career W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henri Becquerel
Antoine Henri Becquerel ( ; ; 15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908) was a French nuclear physicist who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Marie and Pierre Curie for his discovery of radioactivity. Biography Family and education Becquerel was born in Paris, France, into a wealthy family which produced four generations of notable physicists, including Becquerel's grandfather ( Antoine César Becquerel), father ( Edmond Becquerel), and son ( Jean Becquerel). Henri started off his education by attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand school, a prep school in Paris. He studied engineering at the École polytechnique and the École des ponts et chaussées. Career Becquerel's earliest works centered on the subject of his doctoral thesis: the plane polarization of light, with the phenomenon of phosphorescence and absorption of light by crystals. Becquerel was awarded a Doctor of Science in 1888. Early in his career, Becquerel also studied the Earth's magnetic field. Becqu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marie Skłodowska Curie
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (; ; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), known simply as Marie Curie ( ; ), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner of her first Nobel Prize, making them the first married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris. She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her elder sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
