Foreign Relations of the United States, 1947, General; The United Nations, Volume I

501.BC Atomic/8–147

The Deputy United States Representative on the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (Osborn) to the United States Representative at the United Nations (Austin)

confidential

[New York,] August 1, 1947.

Dear Senator Austin: The six papers attached¹ were deposited formally with Committee 2 at Lake Success yesterday. They include a foreword and five chapters of general considerations and specific proposals covering the functions of the international agency and the limitations on its personnel and rights and duties of inspection.

It is expected that these papers will form the major basis of the second report of the Commission to the Security Council on September 15th. Since these papers were drafted with infinite effort by all of the Delegations excepting the Soviet, and since the group leaders in charge were, respectively, deRose of France, McNaughton of Canada, Darwin and Thomson of England, Wei of China² and Nichols of the United States,³ they represent a truly cooperative effort. There seems at this time little doubt that they will be strongly defended by those who wrote them and will be favorably voted on by ten to two.

Yesterday, my committee of consultants met here all day to go over the papers. Including Conant, Oppenheimer, Barnard,⁴ Tolman, Generals Groves and Farrell,⁵ all were present except Dr. Bacher. These men have followed the development of the papers from the beginning. They went over them in final form in great detail. They have one change to make in the mining paper which can probably be covered by a brief amendment. In all other respects they approve the papers thoroughly. They feel that they are a logical development of the first report and, in general, considerably strengthen that report. They recommend them unqualifiedly.

It is proposed that the time from now to August 15th be taken up at Lake Success by discussion in the Working Committee of the material to go into the second report, covering the debate on the Russian amendments, and in Committee 2 by a discussion of the Russian proposals of June 11th. I presume it will be made clear with respect to the Russian amendments that no agreement whatever has been reached and that the proposals of June 11th are wholly inadequate because they do not provide any effective controls. It is then proposed to adjourn from August 15th to August 25th or September 1st. Commencing September 2nd, the Atomic Energy Commission should be in almost continuous session discussing these working papers and possible amendments, preparing the second report in its final form and voting on it. It is believed that two weeks will suffice for this work, and since the Commission, will then be under the Chairmanship of General McNaughton we can be assured of firm direction in the completion of our task.

The tentative instructions of the State Department, as expressed for the present, indicate that the second report should be an interim report presented to the Security Council in the expectation that we will be instructed to write similar specific proposals on (a) staffing and organization, (b) finance, (c) strategic distribution, (d) sanctions, (e) stages. This is the course I have myself recommended to the State Department through your office, subject, of course, to their over-all decisions as necessitated by the determination of our foreign policy from time to time.

Our advisory group is fully in accord with this view, except that, in varying degrees, they have doubts about any group development of stages proposals. They feel too that the matter of stages is affected by many factors which are not yet determined, and our position should therefore be left open.

I will be available any time for a conference with you during the coming week. I shall probably go to Washington for a one-day conference the week following.

Yours sincerely,

Frederick Osborn

1. The papers are not printed here; they do appear, with varying degrees of modification, in the Second Report of the Atomic Energy Commission to the Security Council, September 11, 1947, AEC, 2nd yr., Special Suppl., pp. 12–74.
2. Dr. Hsieh-ren Wei.
3. Col. Kenneth D. Nichols.
4. Chester I. Barnard.
5. Maj. Gen. Thomas F. Farrell.