Department of States Atomic Energy Files
Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. John M. Hancock of the United States Delegation to the Atomic Energy Commission
Mr. Baruch and I met with Mr. Acheson on May 9. We discussed the date of the forthcoming meeting. Mr. Baruch was very clear in his position that he had been embarrassed by the declination of the two committees to go forward with their work without change in set-up.41 He told of the public opinion that the Acheson report has become understood as the government policy and that it was certainly going to be the minimum in the point of view of other governments. Mr. Acheson was very firm in the view that the President was not committed to any policy, that while he had seen the Acheson report and thought well of it, there had been no pressure upon him to accept it. I told Mr. Acheson, and the Chief [Baruch] restated it, that we were sure he had been very careful in his statements to refer to the report in both aspects. First, that it was a basis for study and second, that it was not a statement of policy and that I felt we would have to decide the question as to how far we should go in mentioning specific reservations. It was my feeling at the time that unless we went rather far in listing our reservations we might be condemned by our silence into a position of accepting the report as a statement of policy. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go so far with a statement of our reservations as to appear to reject the report because I thought it was an exceptional document.
On this matter of ownership, Mr. Acheson used the word dominion in place of ownership and I would not be adverse to using the expression absolute dominion, more from the point of view of preventing abuses, in contrast with ownership and its problems.
We discussed the desirability of the meeting in Washington with the members of the two groups on May 17, 18 and 19.
- The two committees under reference are the Secretary of State’s Committee on Atomic Energy and its Board of Consultants.↩