Mr. Winston S. Churchill to President Truman
London, 12 February,
1951.
Dear Mr. President: I venture to address you
on the question of the publication of the Agreement which I signed with
President Roosevelt about the atomic bomb in Quebec in 1943. I have
lately learned that this has been superseded by other agreements made by
you with Mr. Attlee’s Government in 1945 and later. Nothing was said to
the British Parliament at the time about this very important change, and
I feel it my duty to press for a disclosure of the original document and
Agreement. As this has been revoked, and has no longer any binding
force, I feel it belongs to the past and to history. Parliament however
has a right to know what the British position was at the end of the war,
and I cannot believe that the facts can be indefinitely withheld. The
Agreement, although made in wartime, was, as its references to the use
of atomic power for commercial purpose shows, intended to cover more
than the wartime period. The original Agreement, now superseded, has
acquired a new and practical significance from the fact that His
Majesty’s Government have, with my full support, accorded the United
States a most important bombing base in East Anglia, and I have little
doubt that Parliament would consider that this base should not be used
for the atomic bomb without the consent of His Majesty’s
Government.2
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I believe that the publication of the original document would place us in
a position where this guarantee would willingly be conceded by the
United States. This would I am sure strengthen the ties which bind our
two Countries together in “fraternal association” and effective
alliance. This remains as always the prime object of any policy which I
should support.
I congratulate you on the more favourable turn which events in Korea have
lately taken.3 I
have always hoped that the United States, while maintaining her
necessary rights in the Far East, would not become too heavily involved
there, for it is in Europe that the mortal challenge to world freedom
must be confronted. I express my gratitude to you and to your Country,
which I love so well, for the Eisenhower Mission4
and the far-reaching measures which it implies. In this I see the best
hope of world peace, if time is given to us.
Yours sincerely,
