600.0012/1–1254
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Deputy Under Secretary of State (Murphy)
- Subject:
- Atomic Energy Proposals and Disarmament
- Participants:
- Sir Roger Makins, British Ambassador
- Robert Murphy, Deputy Under Secretary
The British Ambassador called at his request, saying that he wanted to talk on a strictly informal basis about the atomic energy proposals and disarmament. He said that Mr. Merchant had filled him in on the Secretary’s conversation yesterday with Ambassador Zarubin,1 but that London keeps peppering him with questions emanating from several agencies of the Government. On the technical side, he said that these were being discussed with other echelons in the Department, but he wanted first of all to see whether our thinking regarding the handling of the disarmament feature corresponded with his. I told Mr. Makins of our initial thinking regarding an eventual meeting in January of the UN Disarmament Commission, saying that Ambassador Wadsworth would undoubtedly be talking to the UK Delegate in New York on this subject; that in essence we believe that a meeting of the Disarmament Commission should be held in January, as the US is Chairman this month; we hoped that there would be agreement that the meeting should be limited to a factual presentation of what has happened since the President’s December 8 speech and that we would hope to avoid for the present action by the Commission in appointing a subcommittee pending possible progress in the US talks with the Russians here and, we hope, in Berlin. Ambassador Makins said he personally agreed with this line and believed that Jebb2 would be in accord. Makins expressed the opinion that at one point there should be a connection between the question of disarmament in the field of conventional weapons and atomic weapons. He felt that any form of prohibition of atomic weapons is not realistic.
Ambassador Makins also inquired again, as he had some weeks ago of the Secretary, regarding US thinking about the scope of the international agency. He felt there were two lines of thought on the British side, as he believed there were on the US side; in Bermuda [Page 1342] the President seemed to have given Mr. Churchill the impression of the possibility of the allocation of very large amounts of fissionable material and larger-scale activities of the agency. (He mentioned again laboratories and research.) On the other hand, he felt that Strauss had talked about a much more modest undertaking, and this corresponded to Cherwell’s thinking. I said that I was not in a position to give him any more information than the indication given to him recently by the Secretary, but that I would guess that perhaps the trend was toward a modest rather than an ambitious undertaking. Naturally, everything would depend on the amount of interest the proposal would generate on the part of the Russians. This, he said, he fully appreciated, but that many people in London apparently had sharpened their pencils and were trying to figure out the proposals in detail.