Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, National Security Affairs, Volume II, Part 2

PPS files, lot 64 D 563, “Atomic Energy–Armaments”

Memorandum by the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Bowie)¹

secret

[Washington,] December 28, 1953.

Atomic Control Plan

1. A complete control plan for atomic energy must provide for the control or supervision of three different aspects:

(a) The production of atomic material, including mining of ore and its refining and the method for producing fissionable materials.

(b) The storage and custody of atomic materials.

(c) The use of atomic materials for military or peacetime purposes.

2. With respect to production of atomic materials, the safeguards must provide for two different kinds of risks:

(a) The risk that such materials will be produced secretly and outside the known facilities. Safeguards against this require some means for discovering or detecting the fact that such secret activities are being carried on, and thus depend, in large part, on an effective system of inspection.

(b) The risk that facilities which are known and in operation may be seized and converted to national use, especially for wartime or warlike purposes. Here the risk is dependent mainly on the fact that facilities are in operation on the territory or of the member State or are within easy access to it for seizure. This risk would be removed by the stopping of production of all kinds or by any other method which eliminated the continuing output of atomic materials on the territory of the member States or accessible to them.

3. With respect to storage, the risks are essentially those which arise from the possibility of seizure of existing inventory, if it is held by some international agency or the risks from national control of such inventory if it is not under international control. Since an existing stockpile is one of the actual problems in the present situation, this could best be removed as a risk by a series of measures which are related to one another:

(a) International control of substantially all of the stockpile. The difficulty here is in knowing whether or not the international agency has achieved exclusive control or whether the member States may have withheld some of their stockpile secretly.

(b) The reduction of the stockpile to some form which would not be readily convertible to military use and would require substantial further processing for this purpose. Ideally this processing would be of a sort which would require substantial time and extensive facilities of a unique type.

(c) The storing of the stockpile in some remote place which would be difficult of access by any person or state likely to try to seize the stockpile. Here again the objective should be to make it possible for other states to prevent the conversion to military uses by the offending nation before it could be a serious threat to other states.

4. With respect to use, the risks involved differ somewhat according to the use:

(a) Use for research is likely to involve such small quantities as not to constitute a serious military risk.

(b) Use for medical and similar purposes is likewise not likely to require such large amounts as to be a serious military threat.

(c) Use for power purposes will present somewhat greater danger. If power facilities became common, there would be substantial amounts of fissionable material spread around in many areas of the world. However, the cost of such facilities would be one factor limiting the total amount which could be made accessible. Also, the extent of risk would be somewhat dependent on the ease with which the material once inserted in the pile could be removed and converted into military uses. This would depend somewhat on the design of the piles and on the kinds of facilities which were available for cleansing and other operations to the State which was seeking to divert the material. Finally, the extent to which the economy of the State involved was dependent on the output of power from the atomic source would be a limiting factor in any large-scale diversion.

5. The relation of any plan for a peacetime atomic pool to the foregoing considerations is as follows:

(a) Such a pool need not affect in any way the production of atomic materials. In other words it would be entirely feasible to set up such a pool for peacetime purposes without stopping or inspecting the facilities for output in the various states. Of course, to this extent, the plan would not in any way reduce the continuing danger arising from known or secret output of atomic materials. In so far as it removed from national control some part of this output or earlier output, it would reduce the possible damage which could be done by any state through the use of such material. But this could well be only a very small part of the total amount of output and stockpile of the various states.

(b) The storage problem for such a pool would present similar problems to those under a full-scale control plan. There are major differences, however, so long as the amounts contributed to the pool would not be large compared to national stockpiles. In this situation no state would feel the same degree of dependence on the safeguards for the U.N. pool because it would have its own stockpile for use against any effort to seize the U.N. stockpile. On the other hand, a full-scale transfer or large-scale transfer to the U.N. stockpile would present much more serious issues for member states in insuring that the stockpile was secure from seizure. But if one assumed that power production will become an important factor in the future, then this question of security of the material in the hands of the U.N. agency could be a more serious problem, even if not arising in connection with full-scale control.

(c) With respect to use of atomic materials, the problems under a pool plan would be much like those under any form of control. That is, the same kinds of safeguards and the same kinds of dangers would arise under both systems. Again, however, if the pool plan represented only a small part of the total available stockpile of atomic material and if the member states retained a very large national stockpile they might feel that the dangers to them of any diversion from the power purposes would entail much smaller risks than under a full-scale control system.

1. The source text is copy 1 of 2 copies. The recipient of the second copy is not indicated.