USUN Files
Memorandum by the Deputy United States Representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (Osborn) to the United States Representative at the United Nations (Austin)
Actual voting on the specific proposals to be embodied in the second report of the Commission will probably begin around the end of July.
This memorandum is to inform you in some detail of the present status of our work and the line of action planned by this Delegation, subject to any change made in our previous instructions, in order that you may keep the State Department, and through them also the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Atomic Energy Commission fully informed.
Up to this time the Commission has been engaged in preparing working papers for discussion in Committee 2. No nation, as such, is finally committed to the contents of any of these papers, but we have taken an active part along with the other Delegations in drafting them, and we believe the contents to be in full accord with the American position. The various group leaders who directed the original drafting are making notes of the discussions on these papers now commencing in Committee 2, and will coordinate and clarify the papers to put them in form for their final consideration in Committee 2 by the end of July. It is at this time that there will be the best opportunity for proposing amendments.
It is hoped to complete this process and to move the papers into the Working Committee about August 1st. In the Working Committee, amendments will still be possible, but more difficult, to make. Material will then be added to put the papers in the form of a report and the final report will probably be voted on by the end of August or the first week in September. The report will presumably cover only the present content of the working papers, namely, all of the functions of the [Page 541] international agency, including the limitations of personnel with respect to inspection, etc., and possibly some statement on the staffing and organization of the international agency. It is not expected that there will be any new material on financing, sanctions, or stages. The subject of strategic distribution is touched on in a tentative way in the working papers on nuclear fuels and reactors, and we shall discourage any attempt to elaborate this or other subjects this summer. Copies of all these papers in their present form, with the exception of the paper on staffing and organization, are now in your hands, and have also been sent to the State Department, the U.S. Commission, and the Military Staff Committee. Additions will be forwarded you currently. The present papers provide that the amount of nuclear fuel to be produced will be held at all times to the minimum necessary to meet the needs of research and development projects and of power plants actually approved for construction. There are no such prospective plants now; the working papers provide that when further technical advances prove the feasibility of such plants, the matter of increasing the available quantities of nuclear fuel and, therefore, of deciding its strategic distribution, will be referred for decision to all nations signatory to the treaty before the agency is permitted to embark upon a major program of producing nuclear fuels.
The vote in Committee 2 and the final vote in August or September in the Working Committee, and then in the Commission itself, would represent approval of this work as the basis for the second report. It would not bind the United States to the final form of a treaty, since this would be contingent on future agreement on questions as yet undecided; but it would represent a further step in the series of commitments which have already been made.
It is our understanding that we will vote affirmatively on these papers, provided their contents continue to represent, as we believe they now do, an elaboration of the proposals in the Acheson-Lilienthal report, of the proposals put forward by Mr. Baruch, and of the Commission’s report of December 31, 1946—all within the explicit instructions of the President of the United States, bearing his signature and initials in a memorandum to Mr. Baruch of June 7, 1946.1 These papers represent a strengthening of the safeguards proposed in Chapter V of the year-end report, and we consider them to be fully in conformity with the principles contained in the General Findings and Recommendations.
If any of these matters need clarification, we will make ourselves available at any time to you or to the State Department.
- For text, see Foreign Relations, 1946, vol. i, p. 846.↩