What We Propose

VOLUME 178

NUMBER 1

JULY, 1946

89th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

STOPPING THE ATOMIC ARMAMENT RACE

by DAVID E. LILIENTHAL

Chairman, State Department Board of Consultants on Atomic Energy

THREE months after the annihilation of the city of Hiroshima by a single atomic bomb, the United States pledged itself to the proposition that, by some form of agreed international action, atomic weapons should never again be used in warfare. By thus taking the initiative in seeking to eliminate atomic warfare, this country assumed a certain responsibility to advance specific proposals to that end.

On March 28 Under Secretary of State Acheson made public A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy. This Report embodied the elements of a specific plan, and one that is admittedly novel in international affairs. In his Foreword, Secretary Byrnes says that this is “a suitable starting point for the informed public discussion which is one of the essential factors in developing sound policy.”

We who wrote this Report offer it “not as a final plan, but as a place to begin, a foundation on which to build.” We laid down fundamental policies but did not seek to spell out the last details of a world charter. We did not hold out a plan that at a single stroke would cure all international ills. We did not seek to devise a plan that might work if the peoples of the world had already fully developed habits and practices of world cooperation. We did try to develop a proposal, built upon conditions as they exist in the world, that would afford security against the surprise use of atomic weapons, would create deterrents to schemes of aggression, and would promote the beneficial possibilities of this new and revolutionary force.

I believe that this plan does offer a unique opportunity to begin the building of the edifice of peace. I believe the opportunity lies not in the fact of universal fear of the atom bomb, but rather in the faith that fraternity among men will ultimately develop out of working together on tangible undertakings of common and mutual benefit to all mankind. There is just such an opportunity in the international cooperative development and control of atomic energy, and this is the heart of our plan. “We are even sustained by the hope,” we said in our Report, “that it may contain seeds which will in time grow into that cooperation between nations which may bring an end to all war.”

This Report was developed and written as the joint thinking of the following five men, designated as a State Department Board of Consultants: Chester I. Barnard, President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company and a leading authority on organization; Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the world’s great physicists, who had the responsibility of the bomb plant at Los Alamos, New Mexico; Dr. Charles A. Thomas, Vice President of Monsanto Chemical Company, a leading industrialist and a famous chemist; Harry A. Winne, Vice President of General Electric and an engineering administrator of exceptional talents; David E. Lilienthal, Chairman of TVA.

Copyright 1946, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

We read our entire report aloud for criticism by another group of men, also of widely varying experience, the Acheson Committee, consisting of President James B. Conant of Harvard, Dr. Vannevar Bush of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, General Leslie R. Groves, head of the Manhattan District, — these three men were outstandingly identified with the bomb, — and two experienced and wise public servants: former Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy and Under Secretary of State Acheson, the chairman.

We were heartened to find a great measure of agreement on all the essentials of an admittedly drastic proposal. But we were fully aware that this was only a beginning; that only if the plan was widely discussed around the family dinner tables, at the soda fountains, in the corner stores, in the schools, the churches, the lodges, and the unions of America, and there understood and there generally approved, could anyone feel that real progress had been made.

As we began our work on January 23 in a dismal hide-away on 16th Street in Washington, we had two objectives: (1) security against atomic war, and (2) promotion of atomic energy’s great benefits to mankind — weapons against cancer, against drudgery, as a tool of research of incalculable consequences in the life of man. These two uses — one vastly destructive, the other unimaginably beneficent — are interdependent. The beneficial applications of atomic energy become possible only if the operations fraught with destructive possibilities first occur. Here is the rub; but, as we concluded after weeks of study, here is the opportunity, too.

The dire consequences of an actual atomic war have been painted in graphic terms by men who know what they are talking about. That has been a public service, because it is essential that we have some idea of these things. But knowing how dangerous an atomic armament race would be, and how disastrous an atomic war would be, is not enough.

The important question is: What are we going to do about it? Admittedly the problem is one of the very greatest complexity and difficulty. Admittedly nothing we work out will be 100 per cent foolproof. But whatever we devise, it had better be good, and we had better be getting at it.

My four associates and I shut ourselves up for two months to develop some proposal that might be useful. Here, very briefly, is a summary of our conclusions.

We agreed that the dangerous aspects of atomic energy would threaten world security if left in the hands of individual nations and their citizens, despite the most carefully phrased international “agreements” or “conventions” against their use in war. No system of inspection to enforce such agreements, no policing methods alone, could be effective so long as nations could lawfully develop these dangerous uses. National rivalries would make policing of agreements against wartime uses quite unworkable.

The essence of our recommendation was, therefore, that the peoples of the world, through the United Nations, agree to vest exclusive responsibility for the development and operation of the dangerous aspects of atomic energy in a worldowned and world-controlled agency — we proposed the name “Atomic Development Authority.” By placing intrinsically dangerous activities exclusively in the hands of the international agency, the problem of inspection of evasions is reduced to workable proportions. The Authority would be operated by a force of scientists, engineers, managers, and workers recruited from all countries. This international agency would be set up under a detailed charter effective only when it had been ratified by the legislative bodies of the nations, including, of course, the Senate of the United States.

Dangerous activities (hence ones that cannot be carried on legally by nations or their citizens) we define as any activity which offers a solution to one of the three major problems of making atomic weapons: —

1. The provision of raw materials — the ores of uranium and thorium.

2. The production of the materials that go into bombs, uranium 235 and plutonium.

3. The making of atomic weapons.

The Atomic Development Authority, then, set up under the UN, would own or exercise managerial control over all useful uranium deposits, and would build and operate all the primary plants — the dangerous plants; that is, the plants like those we now have at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, that produce materials out of which bombs can be made. The power and heat produced as a kind of by-product of these primary plants would be sold in the country in which a world plant was located, in accordance with the policies of that country. Such plants would in time be built by the Atomic Development Authority in various parts of the world, to develop a worldwide geographic and strategic balance.

But there would be no international monopoly in the non-dangerous aspects of atomic energy. The line between dangerous and non-dangerous aspects of atomic energy — necessarily subject to redrawing in the light of new knowledge and circumstances— permits the decentralized use of atomic energy by nations and their citizens, in research, in medical and biological fields, in industry, and in the production of heat and power. The only monopoly would be in the dangerous aspects, and that monopoly would be an international one.

The fissionable materials, product of these world plants, could be supplied under license to nations and individuals, but in a denatured form. This denaturing, plus international supervision and technical aid, would render the materials safe in the sense that they could not effectively be used in that form for atomic explosives but they could be used for beneficial purposes, in private industry and in other ways. Any illicit “monkeying” with the doctored materials to make them into atomic explosives (that is, to take out the denaturant) would require very extensive plants — so extensive as to be readily detectable by the forces of the world Authority. Any meddling with the dangerous primary plants, such as an effort to smuggle out some of the dangerous material, would be detectable as soon as it was tried.

Any act by a nation to seize one of these plants would, of course, be an act of aggression of war, and there would be time, before the seized material could be made into bombs, — this would require more than a year, — for the other nations to take separate or international action. Thus, even if the plan failed because a nation violated world law, surprise attack would not be possible.

The plan proposes that it be adopted as a whole but put into effect on a stage-by-stage basis, but the details of such progression and our disclosure of secret information that this involves is left for international negotiation.

The Atomic Development Authority would not be a mere international detective force, but, as its proposed name implies, a development agency engaged in operations and extensive research. To provide security the ADA must know. New developments in this field will come rapidly. The agency entrusted with control must know as much as anyone in the world about such new possibilities— or perhaps more. For how can an “inspector” intelligently look for a plant or process if he is unfamiliar with the principles of its design?

There is an even more important though perhaps less obvious reason. “To be genuinely effective for security,” our Report states, “the plan must be one that is not wholly negative, suppressive, and police-like. We are not dealing simply with a military or scientific problem but with a problem in statecraft and the ways of the human spirit. Therefore the plan must be one that will tend to develop the beneficial possibilities of atomic energy and encourage the growth of fundamental knowledge, stirring the constructive and imaginative impulses of men rather than merely concentrating on the defensive and negative. It should, in short, be a plan that looks to the promise of man’s future wellbeing as well as to his security.”