Foreign Relations of the United States, 1946, General; the United Nations, Volume I

Department of State Atomic Energy Files

The Board of Consultants to the United States Representative on the Atomic Energy Commission (Baruch)

[Washington,] May 19, 1946.

Dear Mr. Baruch: At the close of the meetings with you in the Blair Lee House yesterday,⁴³ you asked us to summarize the main features of a policy that would reflect the conclusions in our Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy. We are glad to try to make a summary that may be helpful to you, although you will appreciate that in order to be understood and evaluated any statement of this kind will have to be read in the context of the entire Report.

The first basic conclusion of the Report is that an international agreement leaving the development of atomic energy in national hands, subject to an obligation not to develop atomic energy for war purposes and relying on an international inspection system to detect evasions, will provide no security and indeed will be a source of insecurity.

The second basic conclusion is that avoidance of an atomic armaments race can only be achieved by entrusting to an international organization managerial control of all activities intrinsically dangerous to world security. If an international agency is given sole responsibility for the dangerous activities, leaving the non-dangerous open to nations and their citizens and if the international agency is given and carries forward affirmative development responsibility, furthering among other things the beneficial uses of atomic energy and enabling itself to comprehend and therefore detect the misuse of atomic energy, there is good prospect of security. In our Report the international agency is called the Atomic Development Authority.

The fundamental features of a plan which would give effect to these basic conclusions are as follows:

1) As to the raw materials—uranium and thorium. Once the Atomic Development Authority has been set up, its first purpose will be to bring under its complete control world supplies of uranium and thorium. Wherever these materials are found in useful quantities, the Authority must own them or control them under effective leasing arrangements. One of its principal tasks would be to conduct continuous surveys so that new deposits will be found, and so that the agency will have the most complete knowledge of the world geology of these materials. It will be a further function of the agency constantly to explore new methods for recovering these materials from media in which they are found in small quantities so that if, and when, it becomes practical to recover uranium and thorium from such sources, means of control can also be devised for them.

In this way there will be no lawful rivalry among nations for these vital raw materials, and one of the most serious causes of friction between nations will be avoided. As will appear from what follows, by placing exclusively in the hands of the Authority the other dangerous activities relating to atomic energy, rivalry between nations as to them, and the potential friction which it would cause will also be eliminated.

2) As to primary production plants. The Atomic Development Authority must exercise complete managerial control of the production of fissionable materials. This means that it must actually own and operate all plants producing fissionable materials in dangerous quantities and own and control the product of these plants.

3) As to atomic explosives. The Authority must be given exclusive authority to conduct research in the field of atomic explosives. When the plan is fully in operation there would be no stockpiles of atomic bombs anywhere in the world, either in national or in international hands. But research activities in the field of atomic explosives are essential in order that the Authority may keep in the forefront of knowledge in the field of atomic energy and fulfill the objective of preventing illicit manufacture of bombs. For only by preserving its position as the best informed agency will the Authority be able to tell where the line between the intrinsically dangerous and the non-dangerous should be drawn. If it turns out at some time in the future, as a result of new discoveries, that other materials or other processes lend themselves to dangerous atomic developments, it is important that the Authority should be the first to know. At that time measures would have to be taken to extend the boundaries of safeguards.

4) Strategic distribution of activities and materials. The activities entrusted exclusively to the Authority because they are intrinsically dangerous to security, as well as stockpiles of raw materials and fissionable materials, must be distributed geographically throughout the world in such a way as to establish a strategic balance.

5) Non-dangerous activities. Atomic research (except in explosives), the use of research reactors, the production of radioactive tracers by means of non-dangerous reactors, the use of such tracers, and the production of power in plants which use up, rather than produce, fissionable materials, are to be open to nations and their citizens under reasonable licensing arrangements from the Authority. Denatured materials necessary for these activities would be furnished, under lease or other suitable arrangement by the Atomic Development Authority.

The foregoing emphasizes the fact that the production of these denatured materials can only be acomplished through dangerous activities; that is to say the promising non-dangerous, beneficial applications of atomic energy become possible only if dangerous operations first occur.

It is important to be aware at all times of the necessity for taking advantage of the opportunity for promoting decentralized and diversified national and private developments and of avoiding unnecessary concentration of functions in the Authority. It would, therefore, be a primary function of the Authority to encourage developments by nations and private enterprise in the broad field of non-dangerous activities.

6) Definition of dangerous and non-dangerous activities. All activities relating to atomic energy from the mining of raw materials through the production of the active materials, and including research in atomic explosives, must be classed as dangerous to security. All other activities in the field are classed as non-dangerous, although for some of them (such as the production of power in plants which use up denatured fissionable materials) close questions as to security must be faced. This is merely a rough classification. Although a reasonable dividing line can be drawn between the dangerous and the non-dangerous, it is not hard and fast. Machinery must therefore be provided to assure constant examination and reexamination of the question, and to permit revision of the dividing line as changing conditions and new discoveries may require.

7) Inspection activities. By assigning intrinsically dangerous activities exclusively to the Atomic Development Authority, the problem of inspection is thereby reduced to manageable proportions. For if the Atomic Development Authority is the only agency which may lawfully conduct the dangerous activities in the field of raw materials, primary production plants, and research in explosives, then any visible operation by others will constitute a danger signal. This situation contrasts vividly with the conditions that would exist if nations agreed that each of them would conduct those dangerous operations, but would do so solely for proper purposes; for surreptitious abuse of such an agreement would be very difficult to discover by any system of detection that might be devised. It is far easier to discover an operation that should not be going on at all than to determine whether a lawful operation is being conducted in an unlawful manner.

The plan, therefore, does not contemplate any systematic or large-scale inspection procedures covering the whole of industry. Many of the inspection activities of the Authority should grow out of and be incidental to its other functions. The chief measure of inspection will be those associated with the tight control of raw materials, for this is one of the keystones of the plan. The continuing activities of prospecting, survey and research in relation to raw materials will be designed not only to serve the affirmative development functions of the agency but also to assure that no surreptitious operations are conducted in the raw material field by nations or their citizens. Inspection will also occur in connection with the licensing functions of the Authority. Finally, a means should be provided to enable the international organization to make special “spot” investigations of any suspicious national or private activities.

8) Personnel. The personnel of the Atomic Development Authority will have to be recruited on a truly international basis, giving much weight to geographical and national distribution. Although the problem of recruitment of the high-quality personnel required for the top executive and technical positions will be difficult, it will certainly be far less difficult than the recruitment of the similarly high-quality personnel that would be necessary for any purely policing organization.

9) Negotiation stage. The first step in the creation of the system of control we envisage is the negotiation among the nations of the world of a Charter spelling out in comprehensive terms the functions, responsibilities, authority, and limitations of the Atomic Development Authority. Once a Charter for the agency has been written and adopted, the Authority and the system of control for which it will be responsible will require time to become fully organized and effective. The plan of control will therefore have to come into effect in successive stages. These should be specifically fixed in the Charter or means should be otherwise set forth in the Charter for transition from one stage to another.

10)Stages of operations. After it is created, one of the first major activities of the Authority must be directed to obtaining cognizance and control over the raw materials situation. There are probably other activities in which the Authority would have to begin its work almost as soon as it is set up. But except for control of raw materials, most of the operations of the Authority are, from the standpoint of the practical workability of the plan, subject to scheduling. Some of them, merely because of the time required to get them under way have to come at later stages. But the schedule for most of them—that is, outside the raw materials control—is properly a matter for negotiation and the manner in which we and other nations treat their scheduling may affect the acceptability of the plan but not its workability.

11)Disclosures. In the deliberations of the United Nations Commission on Atomic Energy, the United States must be prepared to make available the information essential to a reasonable understanding of the proposals which it advocates. If and when the Authority is actually created, the United States must then also be prepared to make available other information essential to that organization for the performance of its functions. And as the successive stages of international control are reached, the United States must further be prepared to yield, to the extent required by each stage, national control of activities in this field to the international agency.

12) Security achieved through the Atomic Development Authority. When fully in operation, we believe that the plan proposed can provide a great measure of security against surprise attack. Once the operations and facilities of the Atomic Development Authority have been established and are being managed by that agency within other nations as well as within our own, a balance will have been established among the nations of the world. Protection will lie in the fact that if any nation decides upon a program of aggression and seizes the plants or the stockpiles of raw and fissionable materials that are situated in its territory, other nations will have similar facilities and materials situated within their own borders so that the act of seizure need not place them at a disadvantage; protection will lie in the further fact that if a would-be aggressor seizes facilities, a year or more would be required after seizure before atomic weapons could be produced in quantities sufficient to have an important influence on the outcome of war. Thus all the nations of the world would receive well in advance of the possible time of attack by atomic weapons clear, simple, and unequivocal danger signals that would enable them to prepare all measures of protection that would be available—an opportunity which would be wholly lost to them in the event of surprise attack.

As the plan goes into operation and continues, it can, moreover, create deterrents to the initiation of schemes of aggression, and it can establish patterns of cooperation among nations, the extension of which may even contribute to the solution of the problem of war itself.

In this response to your request of yesterday for a summary, we fear that we may have sacrificed something of clarity and completeness to our desire to comply with your request as quickly as possible. If there is anything that you wish in the way of clarification or enlargement, or if there is any way at all in which you feel this Board can be helpful, in further discussion or otherwise, please be assured that we are anxious to cooperate with you in your enormously difficult task.

In this letter we have not attempted to touch again upon the many matters that were discussed during the Blair Lee House meetings. If as to them it would be useful to you to have a memorandum from us stating the views that we offered in the discussions, we shall of course be glad to prepare it.

Sincerely yours,

• Chester I. Barnard
• J. Robert Oppenheimer
• Charles A. Thomas
• Harry A. Winne
• David E. Lilienthal,

Chairman

43. The Acheson Committee, its Board of Consultants, and Mr. Baruch and his assistants, met at Blair-Lee House in Washington on May 17 and 18. The participants of the conference sought to reconcile the Acheson-Lilienthal Report with the views of the Baruch group which had been studying the question of international control since early April. Minutes of the Blair-Lee House sessions exist in the Atomic Energy Lot File, Department of State; for an account of the proceedings, see Hewlett and Anderson, pp. 562–567.