Department of State Atomic Energy Files
Paraphrase of Telegram From the British Foreign Office to the British Embassy in the United States 1
Errera approached the British Embassy in Brussels with a tentative suggestion that the Belgians should build an atomic energy pile alongside our own in the U.K. and that the power from this pile should be transmitted by cable to Belgium. He said that this approach was only a preliminary feeler to find out whether we would regard the proposition with favour and how highly we rated the possibility of a pile in the U.K. being seized in the event of war. His idea was that, if we were encouraging, he would suggest that Spaak should raise the matter formally.
We considered the proposal to be very premature and suspected that the Belgians had read into the news that we were building an atomic energy plant the idea that it is now a practical proposition to produce useful power from atomic energy. Apart from this there are certain technical difficulties in transmitting a large supply of power over the long distance involved.
Our Ambassador to Belgium saw the papers while in London recently and agreed to speak to Spaak saying that we had heard of Errera’s proposal and assumed that it was unofficial. We agreed with the principle behind it of close Anglo-Belgian co-operation in the peaceful development of atomic energy which was in fact written into the Anglo-Belgian-American agreement. This particular proposal was however very premature but we would be glad to consider it at a later stage if the Belgians wished to put it forward. Our military authorities had no fears on the score of vulnerability.
It seems that Errera approached the United States Embassy at the same time. The U.K. Ambassador agreed to tell the United States Embassy about the general statement which he was making to Spaak.
- This document was transmitted to Gullion by Donald D. Maclean, First Secretary in the British Embassy, on September 30.↩