Atomic Energy

on the World Today

THE control of atomic weapons and the development of atomic energy for industrial use are inextricably intertwined. Only through continuity in policy and a constantly controlled process can we establish international agreement regarding them.

To Secretary of State Dean Acheson these complicated matters are no new thing. Shortly after the war Mr. Acheson, then Under Secretary of State, participated in the first efforts to establish peacetime control of the atomic bomb. Secretary of State Byrnes, in January, 1946, named him chairman of the Committee on Atomic Energy, which included Dr. Vunnevar Bush and Dr. James B. Conant, Major General Leslie R, Groves, and John J. McCloy, former Assistant Secretary of War.

It was to this committee that the panel headed by David E. Lilienthal, now chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, presented in March, 1946, the Acheson-Lilienthal report — the basis of the United States proposals which Mr. Baruch placed before the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.

In order to establish continuity in policy the Administration plans to seek repeal of the twoyear terms voted for the members of the United States Atomic Energy Commission by the Eightieth Congress and restoration of the staggered terms provided for in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut, first chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy and proponent of the Act, has emphasized the importance of staggered terms to assure continuity of Commission operations.

Senator McMahon also expressed the hope that the Committee would hold more open hearings so that the American people may get more information about atomic energy — “and that, too,” he said, “without telling how to make it bomb.”

Denationalizing the atom

Meanwhile, progress has continued in what may be called the “denationalization of the atom”— the effort to determine areas of the United States atomic energy enterprise which can with safety be left for development in a competitive system. In recent months many firms have come into atomic energy work on the basis of straight investment and risk — the hallmark of industrial enterprise as the United States knows it.

Private corporations are working not only in the wide and swiftly growing utilization of compounds containing radioisotopes (which the Atomic Energy Commission’s fourth semiannual report fully discussed) but in two other areas as well: namely, the mining and processing of uranium ores into concentrates of grade high enough to be useful in the atomic energy program, and the manufacture of instruments for detecting radiation, the most familiar example of which is the Geiger counter. Detection instruments during the war years were manufactured by a single company and by the government. Today some forty firms are engaged in this aspect of the atomic energy program.

Two recent events mark further participation by industry in atomic energy operations financed and directed by the Commission. A complete survey of the chemical process problems involved in the manufacture of plutonium — the man-made element formed from uranium 238 — has been undertaken by E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, builder and wartime operator of the great installation at Hanford, Washington. And the Commission has contracted with the Westinghouse Electric Corporation for the construction of an experimental nuclear reactor for use in ship propulsion.

Atomic-propelled ships

From the early days of the atomic energy program, ship propulsion has been among the most frequently predicted applications of the energy of the atom. In ships there is room for the necessary shielding against the radiation of a nuclear furnace. It has also been pointed out that thousands of tons of weight would be eliminated if a reactor were substituted for conventional propulsion equipment, and nuclear fuel for bunker oil; and marked increases in speed could be expected.

Work under the contract will be carried on in coöperation with the Argonne National Laboratory, which is the principal center of the Commission’s reactor development program and will he responsible for the design, development, and engineering of the new reactor. The Navy Department’s Bureau of Ships will specify the requirements for propulsion of naval vessels. The detailed engineering, construction, and operation of the new unit, and the research necessary to its development, will be carried out by Westinghouse. This will be no new experience for Westinghouse scientists and engineers, who shared substantially in the program of the wartime Manhattan Engineer District in the processing of uranium and the manufacture of special equipment, as well as in other research undertakings.

In these developments there is evidence of continued expansion of civil participation — either independent or coöperative — in the national atomic energy program. The report of the Commission’s Industrial Advisory Croup and the response of the Commission contained a further demand for increased integration of private industrial enterprise into the national effort to make the most of atomic power.

More information, please

The Industrial Advisory Croup was appointed in October, 1947, to suggest means of increasing the participation of American industry in the development of atomic energy. After more than a year of study, the group reported that in its opinion there should be greater relaxation of security restrictions, more specific statement of contract procedures, and more detailed publication of needs and opportunities for industrial entry into the national program.

The Advisory Group also advocated the establishment of analytical services by the Commission, to sort out non-secret information and publish it in a form directly utilizable by industry. In addition, the group recommended further reports on the Commission’s contract procedures; increased liberality in “clearing” representatives of industry for consultation on areas of endeavor subject to security restrictions; and alterations in the setup of the Commission’s operating administration.

In receiving the report of the Industrial Advisory Group, the Commission echoed the desire of the industrialists for wider distribution of both unclassified and declassified information on atomic energy. Plans for improved procedures in classification and declassification are being pushed to ensure issuance of everything that can be made public without harm to the national security. But the Commission prefers to use existing technical and professional publishers to channel information to specialized groups of readers as the Commission releases it.

Of great interest is the announcement of early publication of thirteen volumes in the National Nuclear Energy Series. This series, which is expected to run to about sixty volumes when complete, will represent approximately one third of the 2400 documents which thus far have been declassified by the Commission. Publication is being carried out on a contract basis, Columbia University representing the Commission and its research contractors in the manufacturing agreement with the McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Both the report of the Industrial Advisory Group and the Commission’s response to it are marked by recognition, explicit as well as tacit, of the difficulties resulting from security restrictions and the fact that relaxation of those restrictions is nowhere in sight. One paragraph in the Commission’s letter to the Industrial Advisory Group is particularly significant. “We intend to continue to emphasize managerial decentralization,” it declared. “May we call to your attention that the decentralization in operations followed by the Commission is designed in part as a concrete demonstration of how large and far-flung enterprises can be organized for continuity in case an atomic attack should disrupt the headquarters organization.”

If Washington were bombed

About 65,000 people are engaged in the nation’s atomic energy enterprise. Of these, approximately 5000 are employed by the Atomic Energy Commission, but only about 800 of the 5000 work in Washington.

This distribution during the past three years is no matter of chance. Rather, it is a realistic effort to strike a sensible middle course between the two extreme views of atomic warfare which have been so loudly voiced since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the one hand there have been outcries that unless a world government is at once established we had best all lake to caves and wait to be exterminated. On the other, there is the easy dismissal of the atomic weapon as “just another bomb,” with the implication that the methods of war will continue to be conventional.

The most sensible approach to the problem is being made by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. The city of Washington contains three target centers of prime importance to an attacker — the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon area. Assuming the air burst of an atomic bomb over the White House target, the headquarters of the Commission would be rendered useless, and the headquarters staff would be killed.

Hence it is common sense both to hold that staff to a minimum and to decentralize operations so that a temporary or satellite headquarters elsewhere, kept constantly up to date on operational information, could take over on the instant of disaster.

French research and security

The implicit dilemma of bombs and power, of sovereignty and internationalism, of security secrets and public knowledge, found expression in France. Dr. Frederic Joliot-Curie, French High Commissioner for Atomic Energy, in discussing the first French atomic pile shortly after it went into operation at Fort de Châtillon in December, declared that though he was a Communist himself, he would quit the party if it ordered him to give secret information to a foreign power.

“If tomorrow we should discover an essential atomic secret, still unknown to any other country,” he asserted, “our duty as Frenchmen would be to guard it jealously as a secret in France until the United Nations has succeeded in out lawing atomic weapons.”

”Zoe,” as the French reactor has been dubbed, in keeping with the current gay assumption of lightheartedness in face of technological complexities, is the first atomic pile known to come into operation outside the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Utilizing uranium oxide and deuterium, or heavy water, as components instead of the uranium metal and graphite of piles in this country, it operates at a low energy level and is a research instrument rather than a production machine.

The results of fundamental research, Dr. Joliot-Curie said, should and would be published, but publication of practical results must be deferred until a system is set up to control atomic weapons. There was a curious blend of internationalist hope and nationalist realism in Dr. JoliotCurie’s pronouncement.