1524 



Role of Congress 



Congress played no direct role in the negotiations but exercised a 

 restraining influence. At the time of the December 1945 conference 

 which resulted in the Moscow Declaration, Senator Arthur Vanden- 

 berg, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other 

 Members of Congress repeatedly sought and received assurances from 

 the President that the United States would not release atomic energy 

 information before adequate safeguards were established. This pro- 

 tective attitude was heightened by the revelation in early 1946 of 

 evidence of espionage activities in Canada involving the transmission 

 of atomic energy information to the Soviet Union. 



Outcome 



The collapse of the Baruch plan negotiations was a costly diplomatic 

 failure. It would be idle to speculate on the consequent diversion of 

 resources from peaceful uses to armament expenditures. More con- 

 sequential still is the question of how the pattern of cooperation 

 established through a diplomatic success in this critical problem area 

 might have altered the course of postwar political developments. 

 Decisive agreement on an international control system might have 

 put an end to the uncertainty which has prevailed ever since: the 

 paradoxical uncertainty of escalating military power in conjunction 

 with waning security.^" Further, an early agreement might have 

 laid the groundwork for the development of peaceful applications of 

 nuclear energy almost a decade earlier than it in fact occurred, and 

 on a wider scale — thereby, among other things, possibly heading off 

 or making more manageable the present complex economic, energy, 

 and diplomatic situation with respect to oil. But apart from the uses 

 of nuclear power itself, a successful conclusion to the Baruch plan 

 negotiations could have provided an influential precedent — somewhat 

 as the IGY did a decade later, but in a more direct iatergovernniental 

 context — for the acceleration of international cooperative activity of 

 many kinds. It is conceivable, in short, that it might have averted or 

 mitigated the course of the Cold War, 



Assessment 



What were the reasons for the failure? One way of summmg them 

 up is to concede that the American political leaders and scientists 

 involved did not bring to bear the vision and persistent effort de- 

 manded by a problem of this extraordinary nature and magnitude. 

 In more specific terms, some of the elements of the failure were the 

 following: 



— There was a basic contradiction in the U.S. negotiating 

 position. The United States had demihtarized in haste after World 

 War II, whereas the Soviet Union had maintained very sub- 

 stantial forces in combat readiness. This factor argued for 

 retention of the U.S. monopoly of atomic weapons as long as 



ID Various oljservers have commented on this paradox. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations 

 Committee on August 26, 1973, Dr. Herbert York— Chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, 

 and previously Director of Defense Research and Engineering— noted that "ever since shortly after World 

 War II, the military power of the United States has been steadily increasing; over the same period the 

 national security of the United States has been rapidly and inexorably diminishing." (Technical Information 

 for Congress, p. 220.) On May 14, 1968, Secretary of the Air Force Harold Brown declared: "There can be no 

 successful aggression Ijy means of strategic war today." (Thf Kvolutinn nf Inlinmlional Tcchnolngti, \ ol. II, 

 p 630) Earlier, in lO'i", Dr. Henry Kissinger liad written in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policji: Ihc 

 destructiveness of modern weapons dei)rives victory in an all-out war of its historical meaning. {Iliid., 

 p. 629.) 



