Eisenhower Library, Eisenhower papers, Whitman file
Memorandum by Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs1
In discussing with the President this morning the action taken at the Council yesterday2 relative to the review of NSC 112 (Policy on Limitations, Regulation, and Control of Armaments), the President suggested that you might consider the following proposal, which he did not think anyone had yet thought of.
Suppose the United States and the Soviets were each to turn over to the United Nations, for peaceful use, X kilograms of fissionable material.
The amount X could be fixed at a figure which we could handle from our stockpile, but which it would be difficult for the Soviets to match.3
- This memorandum was directed to Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and C. D. Jackson, Special Assistant to the President.↩
- See the memorandum of discussion at the 161st meeting of the National Security Council, Sept. 9, supra.↩
In his memoirs, Admiral Strauss, after quoting this memorandum, comments as follows:
“This was the seed from which the Atoms for Peace program was to grow. Though sown upon the rocky soil of political querulousness and international suspicions, it did germinate and in the course of time struck root.
“On reading the President’s suggestion, my imagination was slow to take fire, but the more I thought about it in the following days, the more promising it began to appear.” (Lewis L. Strauss, Men and Decisions (London, Macmillan and Company, 1963), p. 357).
For a chronology of the development of the Atoms for Peace speech, see the memorandum for the files, dated Sept. 30, 1954, p. 1526.
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