International Cooperation in the Nuclear Field

Abstract

Early in 1950, the Norwegian physicist Gunnar Randers found himself in a predicament: he was in charge of the construction, already at an advanced stage, of one of the first nuclear reactors to be made outside the Anglo-Saxon world, but he had not managed to find the requisite uranium. Indeed, it had been on his instigation that the Norwegian government, encouraged by its national production of heavy water (the first such industrial production in the world), had granted just after the war the appropriations required for the construction of a heavy-water research reactor of low power, quite reasonably assuming that the uranium needed for its operation would be found on Norwegian territory in the course of the few years required to build the reactor.