PPS files, lot 64 D 563, “Atomic Energy Armaments”
Memorandum by the Deputy Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Ferguson) to the Secretary of State
- Subject:
- Work of the Panel of Consultants on Disarmament
I understand that Allen Dulles is coming in to speak to you this afternoon about the work of the Consultants on Disarmament. I think it would be useful if you knew of the conversations that Paul and I and Bob Tufts have had with them on a number of occasions during the past few months.
Just after the Consultants assembled for their first meeting, they asked Paul and me to talk with them, and Bob Tufts joined us for the discussion. It was a very preliminary conversation but it was apparent that the Consultants were interested in the broad analysis of our foreign policy and the general outline of the strategy the Government had laid out for the next five to ten years. The Consultants felt, as we do, that disarmament could not be separated from the other problems with which we are confronted and could not be achieved except in the context of changed political conditions.
We were invited later in the spring to come and talk with them at Princeton and, since neither Paul nor I could do so, Bob Tufts went up and spent a day there. Again the discussion was very general, but there was some attention to the nature of a disarmament program envisaged by the proposals introduced last fall in the United Nations, on which S/P had done most of the preliminary work with the Defense Establishment.
Later, I had several informal talks with Dr. Oppenheimer, and with Mac Bundy after he became the Secretary of the Group, and it was clear that they wanted to go beyond the task of helping Ben Cohen in the work of the United Nations Disarmament Commission, and hoped in the course of the summer to move beyond the proposals of last fall and to provide an original contribution to the work.
The Consultants have been meeting during August in Princeton, Cambridge, and Hanover, and invited me to come up to Princeton two weeks ago to spend a day with them. I did go up, after they had talked among themselves for two days. Dr. Bush and Allen Dulles had to leave before I arrived, but apparently the discussion in Princeton had revolved around the specific idea of Dr. Bush concerning the possibility of a stand-still agreement.
In their discussion of such an agreement, they related it to the proposed tests this fall, and raised the possibility of proposing a [Page 993] stand-still agreement before either side moved further in the thermonuclear field in order to see whether a broader agreement on disarmament could be worked out. They considered the same range of questions that we covered in a memorandum to you two months ago with respect to the paper that Dr. Bush had handed you.1 I think the two respects in which the Consultants viewed the problem differently than we were (1) that they regarded the test this fall as being the main event and not merely a preliminary affair in the development of a fusion weapon, and (2) that they believed the new administration should have an opportunity to decide whether there were possible proposals that would improve the chances of making progress toward a disarmament program, which a thermonuclear test now would prevent.
I might add that in the course of their discussion they had all agreed that no stand-still agreement would be feasible except for a limited period of time (one to two years) and as a prelude to a more general agreement in the disarmament field.
In the course of our discussion it became clear that they were disturbed about presenting their views on this matter formally, when the preparations for the tests this fall had progressed so far. They realized that it would be most difficult to alter the schedule except in a minor way, and they were afraid that the effort to postpone the tests for any substantial period of time might have undesirable effects that would cancel out any possible advantages. They did ask me, however, to bring to the Department’s attention the ideas they had been talking about, and I met with Mr. Bruce, Gordon Arneson, and Doc Matthews on my return and described our talk. It was felt here that the considerations they advanced should not lead us to advise a postponement of the autumn tests until after the first of the year.
I do not know that I have much more to add, except that I had a letter from Mac a few days ago saying they were continuing their meetings, and they still hoped to have a report early in the fall which might add something to the present proposals in the disarmament field.
- A handwritten marginal notation at this point reads: “6/9/52” an apparent reference to the memorandum by Nitze to Acheson of June 9, p. 958. The paper from Dr. Bush has not been conclusively identified, but for an expression of the views of the Panel of Consultants on this subject, see the unsigned and undated memorandum, p. 994.↩