Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–1957, Western European Security and Integration, Volume IV

133. Memorandum Prepared in the Office of European Regional Affairs¹

Washington, December 6, 1955.

PEACEFUL USES OF ATOMIC ENERGY AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

This memorandum is prompted by the NSC action of November 21,² (Tab A) and the Secretary’s memorandum to Mr. Hoover of November 22,³ (Tab B). Its discussion and recommendation have been influenced by extensive RA conversations with officers in the AEC, S/AE, the EUR regional offices, OIR, ICA, and by the views expressed at our Paris meeting of September 22 by representatives from our European Missions, including USRO and CSC-Luxembourg. This memorandum has not been shown to anyone outside of RA.

The President has expressed the conviction that “European integration, with West Germany playing a part, would be a major contribution to world peace; that a unified Europe (achieved by strengthening and expanding into other areas the concepts of NATO, the Brussels Pact, and the Coal and Steel Community) would constitute a focus of power, in addition to the US and USSR, which would greatly advance the material and moral well-being of European peoples and the security interests of the United States.” We would elaborate this thought by the observation that, despite present surface evidences of recovery, boom, prosperity and growth in Western Europe, the USSR will, by 1975, have overtaken Western Europe’s aggregate GNP, unless political and economic decisions are made to increase its power and accelerate its growth. We would also add that unless the United States and Western Europe develop new resources, and implement a plan for making them available to underdeveloped parts of the world, these areas may well look upon the Communist Bloc rather than the West as example and prototype, and look to it for leadership and help, for the growth and development processes they believe they must set in motion. It is in the context of these potentialities and these dangers that the form and purpose of European integration should be considered.

Between defeat of the EDC by the French Assembly and the Meeting of the CSC Ministers at Messina in June, European leadership of the integration movement was quiescent. Very widely in France, but not only there, “supranationalism” became political anathema. Under Spaak’s leadership in Brussels, representatives of the Community of Six governments are now studying possibilities for new initiatives in the field of European integration with its most significant work focusing on atomic energy. Apart from this, Monnet has organized a political action group dedicated to the support of the concept of a United Europe; it comprises, notably, the leadership of the socialist parties in all of the six countries, including leaders previously opposed to EDC. The OEEC is, meanwhile, exploring new fields of cooperative action, including the field of peaceful uses of atomic energy.

The European leaders of the integration movement are recovering their voices. On numerous occasions key leaders have advised us to give them our moral support, but to let them, without overt U.S. intervention, set their pace and work out their difficulties. That this has been their plea has been, in a sense, providential: had they asked otherwise we would not have known what to do. But for us to remain comfortably mute for much longer presents ominous possibilities. For Germany, at least, a failure of the present drive towards integration could remove all restraints upon those special interests capable even now of exploiting East-West tensions in a bold gamble to advance narrow German nationalist purposes. Rampant and successful German nationalism could hardly fail to breed predatory and competitive nationalism elsewhere in Western Europe, from which only the Soviet Bloc could benefit. To forestall such a disastrous, perhaps irreparable, setback to Free World strength and unity, the United States should be prepared to respond promptly, concretely, and favorably to an initiative coming out of Europe.

Discussion of European integration revolves around the concept of peaceful uses of atomic energy. It is a magic, and only partially understood, concept. But it is, we think, well understood that integration in this field could, and probably would, set in motion ancillary and concomitant developments which would lead, over time, towards a real United States of Europe. It is also understood, at least by the leading European participants in planning its use, that peaceful uses of atomic energy cannot, for technical reasons, be dissociated from potential possession of atomic power for military purposes. European countries acknowledge and respect generally the problem faced by the Atomic Energy Commission in working out arrangements with other nations for sharing atomic energy information and materials. They know that real and possibly catastrophic security risks are entailed in improper handling of atomic knowledge and materials. The German industrialists who, today, are pressing for the establishment of a bilateral arrangement between the United States and Germany must be doing so because they think that it would serve their self-interested nationalist aspirations, that such a bilateral could be concluded quickly, and that security difficulties could be easily overcome; this would be an understandable position for industrialists to take in every European country. It would become immediately untenable if it could be made known that the United States was ready to participate in arrangements involving the United States on one side and a group of integrated countries on the other and that this relationship would best serve the interests of all from every standpoint including security.

The very rapid advances in declassification of information on atomic energy which have taken place in particular since the August Conference in Geneva has come to mean that the United States no longer occupies the monopolistic position it once held. Of the various forms of cooperation available to the United States—educational exchanges, provisions of libraries, financing of research reactors, and even supply of know-how and materials needed for operation of power reactors—it is improbable that any except cooperation in the erection of isotopic separation facilities for uranium could, today, constitute a United States initiative which would fundamentally influence the form and purpose of European development in the atomic energy field. Europeans believe that there is the scientific knowledge and there are the resources in Europe for Europeans themselves to have reached within a few years, and unassisted, the stage in atomic energy development where the United States and the USSR now stand today. Advocates of European integration maintain that, if unified, Europe’s rate of progress will be very rapid, but even if European nations make their advances separately and on a national basis, they will, in due course, possess all of the “secrets”, military and peaceful, of atomic energy.⁴

The United States has failed for two reasons to exploit fully its potentialities for effective and constructive leadership in the field of atomic energy as related to our objectives in Europe. The Department of State and the Atomic Energy Commission have not spoken with one voice. The Department has been quietly encouraging European leaders to press forward towards a supranational organization of atomic energy programs in Europe, but it has not said it would refuse to enter into negotiation of bilateral arrangements.⁵ Simultaneously, representatives of the AEC have encouraged the Europeans to come forward for bilateral negotiations.⁶ Not until late October were we even able to say, authoritatively and with support of the AEC, that we could treat a pool of European countries on roughly the same basis that we could treat a single country. Our second difficulty has been lack of precise agreement within the State Department, and among our representatives in Missions abroad, as to what could be conceived as the most promising and realistic form of integration we had in mind when talking about that word. Not until last May had we made it clear that by integration we meant supranational authority and responsibility, and that arrangements less binding were merely cooperative. Even after this distinction was drawn and accepted, however, there has been no agreement that in practical political terms there was sufficient promise in real accessions of authority and responsibility to the Coal and Steel Community of Six to justify according to this Community greater attention and support than to the geographically broader, functionally more diversified, but legally and politically looser association of countries in the OEEC. At our Paris meeting on September 22, vigorous differences of judgment on this question were expressed. The complexity of resolving these differences has not been eased by activity of the Working Committees of the Spaak Steering Committee in Brussels.⁷ They have not yet come forth with clean cut recommendations of new supranational institutions. By and large they have handled their problems very much as would have been done in the OEEC.

The magnitude of the difficulties and the opportunities which confront us as we consider the possible role the United States might play in using its atomic energy resources to assist in European integration suggest several conclusions. We cannot, ourselves, materially contribute to objectives we desire by words alone. Perhaps no single factor so greatly contributed to acceptance of the Western European Union as the United Kingdom’s troop commitment. This was an unprecedented and real change in the United Kingdom’s relationship to Western Europe, conceptually and practically. This action—as no amount of moral encouragement or philosophical explanation could have done—made possible a change in Franco-German relations. A second conclusion is that it is almost inconceivable that the United States can contribute to a comparably revivifying action by Europeans without itself reaching comparably far reaching decisions. Our action must be one which would require overcoming the anxieties of the Congress and preconceptions, uncertainties, and irresolution within the Administrative Branch. If European integration is in the interest of Free World strength, unity and security, and if we want to influence its accomplishment, we must expect our leadership to be measured by the difficulties we face, and these must be seen to be as sensitive and as fundamental as those faced by European leaders urging their peoples to sacrifice national integrity and self-determination for a common goal and good. Our act of faith must match theirs.

Recommendation:

The Secretary should, against the background of the foregoing considerations, persuade the President to direct the Atomic Energy Commission, Mr. Stassen, and the Department of State to prepare, on a highly classified basis, for consultation with key members of the Congress, and subsequently with M. Spaak, the following program of United States action:

1. The United States Government will make available the know-how, the blue-prints and the technical assistance, and lend the financial resources, beyond capacity of the Europeans to provide, necessary for the establishment of facilities for the isotopic separation of uranium at an appropriate location in Europe⁸ provided:

a. The Community of Six establishes by treaty an institution of sovereign authority and responsibility to administer this facility;

b. This authority would enter into treaty relations with the United States which would give both parties assurance, through development of an effective system of control and inspection, that the product of these facilities would be used for peaceful purposes only;⁹

c. This authority by bringing into association other qualifying states in a treaty relationship (perhaps, similar to the U.K. treaty of association with the CSC) and by its participation in cooperative association with European and world groupings of countries (e.g., the OEEC, the International Atomic Energy Agency, etc…),¹⁰ would endeavor to broaden the benefits for world welfare and security of its activities in the field of peaceful uses of atomic energy;

d. This authority would, in amounts and at times specified by treaty, reimburse the United States for its initial financial contribution.

2. To avoid the risks of European criticism of U.S. intervention or excessive influence, the foregoing program when approved by the President should be conveyed to M. Spaak, and, if necessary key leaders in the Six countries, in such terms that the Community could formulate a concrete proposal to the United States Government to which this would, in effect be a response.

1. Source: Department of State, Atomic Energy Files: Lot 57 D 688, Regional Program, Euratom—General. Top Secret. Drafted by Barnett and forwarded by Merchant to Gerard Smith on December 6 under cover of a memorandum which reads as follows:

   “I would like to get together as early as convenient for you on our promised discussion of the peaceful uses of atomic energy in relation to European integration. I attach herewith a memorandum prepared in EUR on this subject with which I am in agreement. I thought it might be useful if you ran over it before we talked and that we might also ask Bob Bowie to join us when we get together.”

   In a postscript to his covering memorandum, Merchant stated that he really regarded this matter “as primarily your pigeon” but he believed that the draft memorandum would be useful. (Ibid., NATO)

2. Reference is to NSC Action No. 1480, which noted President Eisenhower’s statement on European integration, made at the NSC meeting of November 21. See Document 129. The text of the NSC action, approved by Eisenhower on December 1, is in Department of State, S/S–NSC (Miscellaneous) Files: Lot 66 D 95, NSC Records of Action.
3. Document 130.
4. The first of several handwritten marginal notations on the source text, presumably written by Smith, reads as follows: “They are not engineers, scientists.”
5. A marginal notation on the source text reads as follows: “rather the Pres. hasn’t spoken in the same vein as Barnett.”
6. A marginal notation on the source text reads as follows: “AEC has resisted it all along.”
7. A marginal notation on the source text reads as follows: “have we told Spaak about ‘integration vs. cooperation’.”
8. We believe that the location of these facilities in the Saar would have certain political advantages, but this possibility should be explored further both from the political point of view and technical feasibility. [Footnote in the source text.]
9. A marginal notation on the source text reads as follows: “leaving them to use their P. weapons”.
10. Ellipsis in the source text.