111. Letter From Secretary of State Dulles to Foreign Secretary Lloyd1
Dear Selwyn: I have this morning received your message about trade controls, with its note of urgency. I have been working actively on the matter all day and give you herewith the best conclusions I can now arrive at.
This is a very difficult problem and it is full of serious implications. The Senate Committee, headed by Senater McClellan, has taken a very active and aggressive interest in this matter. There are, I fear, political overtones and appreciable danger that a Congress which finds foreign aid particularly distasteful this election year might try to find in this a reason either for truncating the entire program or for attaching conditions which would seek to penalize heavily any trade with the Soviet or Chinese Communist bloc in whatever Congress might define as strategic goods. I can assure you that this danger is not imaginary.
I feel today that under all the circumstances the best we could contemplate would be a package which would (a) put copper wire back on the COCOM list and tighten up somewhat the entire [Page 344] control system and (b) take rubber and a number of miscellaneous items, perhaps 30 or 40, off the CHINCOM list.
The Defense Department and Chiefs of Staff feel most strongly about the copper matter and I really wish that, quite apart from anything else, you would review this situation not as a matter of bargaining between us but as part of our common endeavor to retard the development of the Soviet military establishment, particularly in terms of modern weapons and means of communication—all of which requires copper and, above all, copper wire.
I feel confident that none of us would have wanted to take copper wire off the list had we foreseen the obviously great need therefor of the Soviet Union for its military purposes, as demonstrated by its very heavy purchases.
Please let me know whether you would want to try to work along the above lines. If so, we will try to respond, although it is extremely awkward for us to be dealing with this matter at the same time on two fronts, one the Congressional front and the other the international front with our associates in London and Paris.
Sincerely yours,
- Source: Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, Dulles–Herter Series. Personal and Confidential. Dulles delivered this letter to Coulson at 4:55 p.m., April 19; see the memorandum of conversation, infra. On April 20, Dulles forwarded a copy of this letter to President Eisenhower with a brief covering note.↩
- Printed from a copy that bears this typed signature.↩