Department of State Atomic Energy Files
Memorandum for the File by Mr. R. Gordon Arneson, Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of State (Lovett)
top secret
[Washington,] September 22, 1948.
Subject: U.K. Request for Information on Weapons
In the course of luncheon today Henderson1 raised several points concerning the British requests for information on atomic weapons:
- 1.
- The U.K. is considerably worried about the initial negative reaction which Woodward received from Carpenter and Webster on September 16.2
- 2.
- In response to a query, Henderson said he was confident that the U.K. military authorities were fully convinced that weapons facilities in the U.K. could be defended against seizure or fifth column action. In elaboration of the point, however, he said in the British view the question of whether facilities could be defended was equivalent to the question of whether the U.K. could survive a third world war. In other words, if the U.K. went down the existence of plutonium piles in the U.K. would be a secondary matter. To this point I replied that such a view could well be interpreted by our military authorities to means that the U.K. was willing to compromise our security in the interests of obtaintaing atomic weapons in the U.K. Henderson agreed that if such an argument were thrown back at the British as a response to their request they would be put in quite a hole.
- 3.
- He appreciated that in the event of the outbreak of war in the near future, the U.K. would not have atomic weapons available from their own efforts even if the U.S. complied with their present request. He agreed that in terms of the common defense and security in the immediate future a more useful solution would be some undertaking by the U.S. to come to the assistance of the U.K. and indeed Western Europe in the event of Soviet aggression.
- 4.
- If the U.S. should decide that as the price for rearming Europe on conventional lines the U.K. must give up its insistence on producing atomic weapons, such a condition would have to be given most serious consideration by the British Government.