113 



marks are described in one source as follows: "When the United 

 States presented its plan, it would have to explain the process of tran- 

 sition. Then the nations would establish an international authority. 

 * * * The United States would not give everything away the day it 

 agreed to institute the plan ; rather, it would promise to do so." 151 Cer- 

 tain actions — e.g., the atomic test at Bikini in July 1946, less than one 

 month following the opening of the UNAEC, or the U.S. failure in the 

 UNAEC negotiations to define the specific control conditions which 

 would determine when it would relinquish its atomic weapons — 

 might well have cast doubt on those pledges, particularly in the eyes 

 of the Soviet Union. 



Thus, both the United States and the Soviet Union acted in the 

 negotiations primarily to meet their individual needs of security, based 

 on their own particular perceptions of the existing threat. Some of 

 these perceptions may have been less than accurate. Nevertheless, as 

 a result, a basic element in each country's policy toward atomic energy 

 control, which could not be ignored or superseded by technological 

 requirements, was to avoid an arrangement which would have sub- 

 jected one party to the suspected goal of domination by the other. 

 For the most part, there is little evidence that a substantial effort was 

 made to combine or reach a compromise between those technological 

 and diplomatic elements which were necessary to reach agreement on 

 international control. By and large, representatives from each field 

 retained their parochial interests, especially in light of the attitudes 

 of representatives of one field toward the other, and approached the 

 problem of atomic energy control accordingly. In short, once the diplo- 

 mats had grasped the import of the possibility of a facile solution 

 offered by the technical experts, they began to mistrust it. For their 

 part, the technical experts had probably underestimated the political 

 difficulties in implementing the solution. And finally, the tasks of 

 both groups were made difficult by the many previous commitments 

 to allies and other countries and to the American people. 



One Attempt at Technical-Diplomatic Coordination 



One example of an attempt to combine technological and political 

 factors of atomic energy control may be evident in the proposal of the 

 groups led by Acheson and Lilienthal to assign a research and develop- 

 ment function to the international Authority. Recognizing the nega- 

 tive human response to police methods of inspection, they hoped that 

 the purposes of security could be served in two ways through research 

 in atomic energy. First, because some national activity would be re- 

 tained in this area, the potential for national rivalries would be chan- 

 neled into constructive purposes. Second, this function of the interna- 

 tional Authority would keep the supranational body technically ad- 

 vanced in terms of detecting activities which were illegal under the 



151 Hewlett and Anderson, History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, 

 p. 548. 



