Department of State Atomic Energy Files
Memorandum by the Chairman-Designate of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Lilienthal) to the Commissioners
This is to record the substance of our conversation with Roger Makins, British Minister here, and until recently Deputy Chairman of the “Insecticide” Committee. (C.D.T.)1
There was much general conversation of a social character—about the British Parliamentary system compared with ours, etc.
He said he was leaving this week to become a permanent under secretary in the Foreign Office; that his successor, Mr. Gordon Munro, and he would appreciate it if the Commission would be willing to see Mr. Munro from time to time.
We made it plain—each of the Commissioners expressing himself on this in one form or another—that the law creating the Atomic Energy Commission made it obligatory upon us to disclose to the Joint Committee of Congress our “activities” in respect to raw materials under the Insecticide arrangement, and that that disclosure might of necessity be forthcoming quite promptly, either during the hearings on our confirmation now going on, or as soon as the Joint Committee held its first meeting with us. Admiral Strauss read the applicable [Page 785] provisions of the law to Mr. Makins, and also made it plain that disclosure was a matter of our affirmative duty. We all made the point, not once but several times, that the proper and ordinary way for the report of the wartime arrangements was on the initiative of the State Department, and that this we had recommended to the State Department on several occasions. We also made clear that whatever might be the British feeling about cooperation agreed to during the war, that cooperation to the extent that it involved exchange of vital information was almost certainly now forbidden by law, and that this law bound us. We pointed out that there was no alternative but to face these as the realities we suggested, that perhaps the best way would be to regard the wartime agreements as terminated, and a new agreement as to raw materials and their joint purchase contained, and reported to Congress. We made it clear that these suggestions were just “conversation” since these were matters outside our province and would have, of course, to be worked out between the two governments through their departments of foreign affairs.
- Reference is to the Combined Development Trust, established by the Agreement and Declaration of Trust, signed by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill on June 13, 1944; for text, see Foreign Relations, 1944, vol. ii, p. 1026. The Trust operated under the direction of the Combined Policy Committee; regarding the latter, see footnote 4, p. 787. The main function of the CDT was to secure control and insure development of uranium and thorium supplies located outside the jurisdiction of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Dominions, India, and Burma.↩