British representatives in Washington had begun urging the preparation of an agreement to provide for postwar nuclear collaboration between the United States and the United Kingdom as far back as the spring of 1945. In later discussions on the subject after President Roosevelt’s death, the British representatives on the Combined Policy Committee suddenly brought to our attention a document they referred to as the Hyde Park aide-mémoire. They told us that this paper summarized a conversation that they believed took place between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill at Hyde Park on September 18, 1944. This was the first intimation we had had of the existence of any such document, and I got the impression that the regular British representatives in Washington were every bit as surprised at its sudden emergence on the scene as we were.
Despite numerous thorough searches, we were unable to discover any trace of the aide-mémoire in any American files. Neither were we able to find any American who remembered seeing it or hearing of it. We were told that Churchill thought the agreement had been handed to Admiral Leahy, but Leahy said he recalled nothing in the form of an agreement and further that he recalled no discussion of any kind on atomic energy during the Hyde Park visit.
(Apparently he failed to consult his notes, for his book on the war years, I Was There, gave an account of a long discussion on atomic energy on the evening of September 19, between President Roosevelt and Churchill, although it did not mention the agreement.)
While the mutual confidence which had prevailed throughout the war continued undiminished, we were completely mystified by the British references to this document. I am sure that, on their part, the British must have been annoyed by our insistence that we could find no copy of what they considered to be a valid and binding agreement. Where was it? Why had President Roosevelt never told any of us about this highly important document? This still remains a mystery.
At our request, Secretary Stimson was furnished with a copy of this paper by Field Marshal Wilson. Later Mr. Churchill sent us a photostatic copy of the original for our permanent records.
Not until many years later, when the Roosevelt papers were being catalogued at Hyde Park, was the mystery of the whereabouts of the missing Hyde Park aide-mémoire finally cleared up. At that time, a copy of it was found in a file of papers pertaining to naval matters. The misfiling was due, I suppose, to the fact that the paper referred to Tube Alloys, the British code name for the atomic project, and the file clerk must have thought it had something to do with ship boiler tubes. Just how such an important and highly secret paper could have been handed over for routine filing no one has been able to explain. Such a mistake, under less propitious conditions, could have had disastrous results. As it was, it did not seem to make too much difference.
The aide-mémoire was of particular significance because it contained the statement: “Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government in developing Tube Alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement.”
The British naturally attached great importance to this particular phrase when they sought to have our wartime collaboration extended into the postwar era. They were particularly anxious to be relieved of the restrictions on British postwar commercial applications that had been imposed by Article IV of the Quebec Agreement. On our side, also, we felt a need for reappraising the secret wartime Quebec Agreement in the light of the postwar situation. To this end, Patterson wrote to Byrnes on November 1, urging that the State Department undertake a study of the problem.
Shortly afterward, Prime Minister Attlee arrived in Washington, accompanied by Sir John Anderson. There they engaged in conversations first with President Truman and Secretary Byrnes, for the United States, and Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Mr. Lester Pearson, representing Canada. Later, as the conversations developed, the most active participants were Dr. Bush, Sir John Anderson and Mr. Pearson. They eventually arrived at the Truman-Attlee-King Declaration of November 15, 1945. This declaration said, in effect, that while the free exchange of nuclear information would be desirable, it must be controlled and limited to peaceful purposes; to that end the three powers would restrict such exchanges until adequate controls were established by the United Nations.
At the same time it was decided that the Combined Policy Committee should be directed to prepare a draft of an agreement to supersede the Quebec and the Combined Development Agreements. To initiate this, the President directed Secretary Patterson to arrange for a conference with Sir John Anderson, and to have Sir John and me draw up a written agreement covering the decisions already reached at the White House. When Patterson told me this, I asked him what the decisions were. He was startled and asked me if I hadn’t been at the meetings. I told him that I had not been asked, presumably because the State Department had not wanted me to be there.
After some discussion, Patterson telephoned Byrnes, who was also surprised to learn that I had been excluded from the discussions. He told us in a general way what he knew, but disclaimed any knowledge of specific decisions, since he had withdrawn from the meeting when a discussion of the details started.
I was thus faced with the difficult problem of writing a memorandum based upon decisions of which I had no knowledge whatever and which had been made by persons whose identity I did not at the time know. It was possible only because I was familiar enough with the subject to know what those decisions should have been, regardless of who arrived at them, or what they actually were.
Sir John and I agreed that the Combined Policy Committee and the Combined Development Trust should be continued and should supervise whatever arrangements were later agreed upon; but that the Quebec Agreement and possibly the Combined Development Trust Agreement should be terminated and replaced by a new agreement more suitable to the postwar situation. To help the Combined Policy Committee arrive at its recommendations, we prepared a memorandum of intention listing the various points that the new document should cover.
We emphasized that this memorandum was to serve merely as a general guide and not as a commitment to basic policies. The main points of its departure from the Quebec Agreement were the inclusion of Canada as a partner and a provision that all atomic materials, regardless of source (including those in the British Empire), would be subject to allocation by the Combined Policy Committee.
The provisions regarding the exchange of information were essentially unchanged. One of the most important paragraphs in our memorandum read:
There shall be full and effective co-operation in the field of basic scientific research among the three countries. In the field of development, design, construction and operation of plants such co-operation, recognized as desirable in principle, shall be regulated by such ad hoc arrangements as may be approved from time to time by the Combined Policy Committee as mutually advantageous.
This constituted our compliance with our quite hazy instructions.
We were also asked to prepare a short joint statement to be issued by the President and the British and Canadian Prime Ministers. It included the words “that there should be full and effective co-operation in the field of atomic energy” between the three countries. This statement, known as the Truman-Attlee-King Statement, was signed on November 16, 1945.1 Secretary Byrnes did not see it before it was issued, and he was later a severe critic of its necessity and of its wording.
The words “full and” which appear in the first provision of this statement were inserted at the insistence of Sir John Anderson, even though he stated that, in his opinion, they added nothing to the meaning. I strongly opposed the insertion as I felt that it considerably modified the meaning, and that the result was not in the interests of the United States. Secretary Patterson finally permitted the words to go in, stating that in his opinion as a lawyer it made little difference.
At the Combined Policy Committee meeting on December 4, Patterson offered the Groves-Anderson Memorandum as a heads of agreement for discussion and consideration. The committee thereupon appointed a subcommittee consisting of Roger Makins, Lester Pearson and myself, representing the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, respectively, to prepare the new document that was to supersede the Quebec Agreement.
Before the next meeting of the Combined Policy Committee, however, I learned from one of the officers I had had study the situation that any such secret agreement would violate Article 102 of the United Nations Charter. I immediately brought this to the attention of Patterson and Byrnes, and as a result the American members of the committee concluded that no action should be taken that “could in any way compromise the success of discussions within the United Nations.” It was thereupon agreed to refer the matter back to the signatories of the November 16 statement—the President and the two Prime Ministers.
In the meantime, the British had been pressing us for information that they considered essential to the success of their proposed atomic energy program. What they wanted amounted to practically all our development, design and production data, with the exception of those pertaining to the gaseous diffusion project, with which they were already familiar.
The scope of these data went far beyond any interchange contemplated by the Quebec Agreement, by the Truman-Attlee-King Declaration of November 15, by their Statement of November 16, by the Groves-Anderson Memorandum, or by the draft of the proposed new agreement. On April 16, 1946, Prime Minister Attlee stated this new British concept by telling President Truman that, in his view, “full and effective co-operation” could mean nothing less than full interchange of information and the sharing of raw material. He went on to point out that any new agreement reached could be laid down by parallel instructions issued by the heads of the three governments.
President Truman replied on April 20, explaining that the Groves-Anderson Memorandum placed a different interpretation upon “full and effective co-operation” from that indicated by Mr. Attlee. He went on to say that he considered it inadvisable for the United States to assist the United Kingdom in the construction of atomic energy plants, in view of our stated intentions to press for international control of atomic energy through the United Nations.
On June 7, Mr. Attlee again raised the question, insisting that continued collaboration would not be inconsistent with our advocacy of international control. He sought at length to justify all-out postwar collaboration as a natural outgrowth of our limited wartime collaboration. The President did not reply.
Again, on December 15, Mr. Attlee communicated with the President in an effort to break what had become, since the passage of the McMahon Act, a complete stalemate insofar as interchange of information was concerned. As of January 1, 1947, when I turned over my responsibilities to the Atomic Energy Commission, the question had not been resolved.
In summing up the British contributions to the Manhattan Project, I would list:
Late in 1941, the Uranium Section of the National Defense Research Committee, which was in direct charge of the American work at that time, had decided that our effort either should be discontinued or should be pushed forward at a more vigorous pace, with several millions of dollars to be put into research and many more millions to go for production facilities if our research yielded promising results. This report was reviewed by a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences.
At the same time the British were conducting a similar review of the situation as they saw it. Their conclusions were far more optimistic than those of the American group. This British optimism, forcibly expressed by Mr. Churchill to Mr. Roosevelt, played an important part in the decision to expand the American laboratory effort. Without this early expansion before the fall of 1942, the later rapid development of scientific research and other work under the MED would not have been possible.
In the later stages of our work, the British sent over a number of atomic scientists, headed by Sir James Chadwick, a distinguished physicist and a highly valuable advisor. In addition there were about a dozen Canadian scientists in the Project. In view of our shortage of scientists, even this relatively small number was of help, particularly as they were all first-rate men. Unfortunately, among them was Fuchs, whose treachery impaired the total value of their otherwise splendid contributions.
Besides the methods for obtaining fissionable material that we finally carried through to the production stages, a dozen or so other methods were investigated in our laboratories. The British investigation of the gaseous thermal diffusion process was most helpful.
The most important discovery of technical value to come out of the United Kingdom laboratories was that a certain kind of rubber was satisfactory for seals in the gaseous diffusion plant.
On the whole, the contribution of the British was helpful but not vital. Their work at Los Alamos was of high quality but their numbers were too small to enable them to play a major role.
On the other hand, I cannot escape the feeling that without active and continuing British interest there probably would have been no atomic bomb to drop on Hiroshima. The British realized from the start what the implications of the work would be. They realized that they must be in a position to capitalize upon it if they were to survive as a postwar power, and they must also have realized that by themselves they were unable to do the job. They saw in the United States a means of accomplishing their purpose. Their policy and their government’s position were always consistent. Although we were able to keep our operations on a consistent basis during the war, American postwar policy often took off on tangents as new policymakers were brought into the picture.
Looking back on those war days, I can see that Prime Minister Churchill was probably the best friend that the Manhattan Project ever had. He seemed to be able to sense any lag in our work, caused usually by conflicts with other important war work. In such cases, a word from Number 10 Downing Street to the White House would give us new impetus. In addition to his other wartime achievements, Mr. Churchill emerged as our project’s most effective and enthusiastic supporter; for that we shall always be in his debt.
An infinitely more difficult problem than our postwar arrangements with the British was the larger question of what international controls could be worked out for atomic energy. From the first, everyone connected with the project in a senior capacity had been conscious that this was something that would have to be dealt with eventually, but until the end of the war most of us were too busy to give it the consideration that it deserved. Mr. Stimson, though, did think all the way through the problem and its ramifications and, on September 11, 1945, addressed a remarkable proposal to the President, in which I wholeheartedly concurred.
The Secretary pointed out that while our atomic bombs would offset Russian strength on the continent of Europe, the Soviets would surely spare no effort to develop their own atomic arsenal. Unless the United States and the United Kingdom were to bring the Soviets into our position of control voluntarily, the Russians would only be stimulated in their efforts to catch up with us. Mr. Stimson estimated that it would take from four to twenty years for them to do so. He mentioned that their espionage activities during the war indicated that they had already started.
In any approach to the Russians, he said, we should exercise great care to avoid the appearance of negotiating with an atomic bomb at our hip, which could easily so embitter them that our efforts would come to nothing.
He said that the atomic bomb was not merely another more devastating weapon to be assimilated into our pattern of international relations; if it were, it could be treated like gas. Instead, it was a first step by man to release forces that were too dangerous to fit old concepts.
Any action to control atomic energy must be directed to Russia. He felt that the Russians would be more apt to respond honestly to a direct approach from the United States than to one made as part of a general international scheme. He said that we should approach the Russians directly and alone, with the consent of the British, to institute controls and limitations on the use of atomic bombs in war and to encourage the development of peaceful, humanitarian uses for atomic energy. We should not attempt to force any change in the internal government of Russia as a condition of sharing our knowledge with them.
Mr. Stimson’s repeated admonition that any group of nations that had not demonstrated their power would not be taken seriously by the Russians apparently was not subscribed to by our State Department or the British. At any rate, nothing came of his proposal.
In a message to Congress in October,- 1945, President Truman emphasized the problem of international controls in a single sentence: “In international arrangements as in domestic affairs, the release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas—the hope of civilization lies in international agreements.”
This subject was one of the principal topics of discussion in the meetings held in Washington between Mr. Truman, Prime Minister King of Canada, and Prime Minister Attlee of Great Britain, from November 10 to 15. They finally agreed that the initiative rested with “the three countries which possess the essential knowledge of atomic energy.” They made it clear, however, that the responsibility for devising means to control the new discovery rested on all nations alike, or, as they put it, “upon the whole civilized world.” They decided, therefore, to recommend that a commission be set up under the United Nations to draw up proposals for submission to that organization. This decision was embodied in the Truman-Attlee-King Declaration of November 15, 1945.
Meanwhile there had been, and continued to be, widespread public discussion about how the U.S. should conduct its atomic affairs. Much of the written material and the most vocal of the various protagonists took what would be called the liberal position. In general, they wished the United States to proceed with full confidence in the Russians and with good will toward all mankind. They also claimed, most erroneously, that the success of our project had been due entirely to international science, and implied that the United States had no particular rights in the matter.
Unfortunately, the scientific leaders in the project who normally would have been the spokesmen for their colleagues were preoccupied then with getting back to their peacetime occupations at their own universities and I have always felt they simply did not realize what was developing. The result was that a new and vociferous group of spokesmen arose from among the younger scientific people, few of whom had had any experience outside the academic world, and who even there had served in only very subordinate capacities. There were a few others, of course, some of whom sought personal prestige and some of whom wished to forward extreme social points of view. The propaganda emanating from these sources was eagerly seized upon by various ambitious political figures, and by a few people in the State Department who seemed to me more concerned about the momentary good will of other nations than about the welfare of the United States.
Finally, Secretary Byrnes formed a special committee to consider the problem and to advise him on how far the United States should go in offering to share its knowledge with other countries. For this committee he selected the Under Secretary of State, Dean Acheson; the Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy; Vannevar Bush; James B. Conant; and me.
At the first meeting, Mr. Acheson immediately proposed that we appoint a panel to investigate the problem and to report back. He pointed out that we were all too busy to do this work ourselves. I objected on the grounds that at least three of us—Conant, Bush and I—knew more about the broad aspects of the problem that the Secretary wanted us to study than any panel that could be assembled. Besides, I had access to all the scientific assistance that might be needed on any particular point.
I was outvoted; and a panel was appointed with David E. Lilienthal as chairman; Chester Barnard, president of the New Jersey Telephone Company; Harry Winne, a vice president of General Electric; Oppenheimer; and Charles Thomas, of the Monsanto Chemical Company. Of these, only Oppenheimer had a complete awareness and understanding of the problems involved. Thomas was fully familiar with the chemical side of the work at Los Alamos, and to a lesser extent with certain of the other phases of the work. Winne had a good understanding of the problems involved in the electromagnetic process, for General Electric had provided valuable assistance in that operation, and he had been the responsible executive in charge. As far as I know Mr. Lilienthal and Mr. Barnard had little or no knowledge of the subject whatever.
The panel submitted a preliminary draft of its report to the committee early in March. This was thoroughly discussed and a number of vital changes were incorporated in the final report, which was presented “as a foundation on which to build.” The plan, as recommended, called for step-by-step co-operation with the other powers rather than for the first steps to be taken by the United States. This is not our usual diplomatic approach.
The committee declined to recommend the publication of the report for two reasons. First, it was a report to Secretary Byrnes, who was best able to decide whether he wanted it published. Second, we did not feel it wise to disclose to the Russians just how far the United States was willing to go in sharing its knowledge before negotiations had even been arranged for. To the Russians, our final position would be their starting point.
Unfortunately, the report was published by the State Department on the grounds that certain portions of it had been leaked to the press and that it was therefore wise to make the entire text public. As in the case of many other leaks in Washington, everyone blamed someone else. The State Department blamed a Senate committee and the Senators blamed the State Department. While the newspapermen, in accordance with their code, refused to disclose their source, many of them did say privately that the Senate was not responsible.
The report was immediately interpreted as an official statement of United States policy.
During his service as head of the United States delegation to the United Nations, Bernard Baruch often commented on the impossibility of negotiating with the Russians when there was nothing left to negotiate. Naturally, he was bitter that the release of the report had ruined the chance of success. As everyone knows, the negotiations for international control dragged on endlessly, while the Russians were busily engaged in developing their own atomic bombs.
As Baruch has often said, “The Russians would not countenance any effective system of international control of nuclear energy. They were adamantly against any system of international inspection, control and punishment and giving up the veto on any such matters.”
1 Not to be confused with the Truman-Attlee-King Declaration issued the previous day.