NEGOTIATING INTERNATIONAL CONTROL
(December 1945-1946)
Events: Postscript -- The
Nuclear Age, 1945-present

After American, British, and Canadian officials agreed at the November 1945 Washington meeting to a negotiating approach on international control, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes quickly arranged for the Big Three foreign ministers to meet in Moscow in mid-December.  Atomic energy, which the Soviets placed last on a long list of agenda items, was discussed only in terms of the United Nations proposal.  Surprising Byrnes with their willingness to cooperate, the Soviets acquiesced to the American proposal, which was based on the Washington joint declaration, but with one exception.  They agreed that the commission should be set up by the United Nations General Assembly, but, counter to the American plan, they insisted that the commission report to the Security Council and be accountable to it “in matters affecting security.”  This was no mere procedural difference.  Most of the members in the General Assembly, where decisions were made by majority rule, were more closely aligned to the United States than to the Soviet Union.  In the Security Council, the Soviet Union possessed the veto and could effectively halt any commission actions that it found objectionable.

On returning from Moscow, Byrnes named Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson to chair a committee to formulate policy on international control.  Also members were

That same day, President Harry S. Truman asked Bernard Baruch to be the lead United States negotiator at the United Nations.  At age seventy-five an “elder statesman” who had served American presidents in various capacities since World War I, Baruch inclined toward drafting his own proposal and feared being boxed in by the parameters set by the Acheson-Lilienthal report, which had become a public document.  After several months of give and take, however, he accepted the Acheson-Lilienthal plan largely as his own.  Baruch’s one major change was on the issue of enforcement.  The Acheson-Lilienthal plan intentionally remained silent on enforcement, not wanting to put forth terms that suggested mistrust of the Soviet Union.  Baruch, by contrast, insisted on specific penalties.  Violations would be met, he asserted, with “immediate and certain” punishment that would not be subject to Security Council veto.  On June 14, Baruch unveiled the proposal in a speech to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission.  The Baruch plan, as it came to be called, was, as Baruch paraphrased Abraham Lincoln, “the last, best hope of earth.”

Not everyone saw it that way.  Five days later, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet delegate, proposed an international convention prohibiting the possession, production, and use of nuclear weapons.  Only after the convention was implemented, Gromyko stated, should measures be considered to ensure “the strict observance of the terms and obligations.”  He also rejected any attempts to negate the veto.  Gromyko later added that the Baruch proposals could not be accepted “either as a whole or in their separate parts.”

The debate in the United Nations was a debate in name only.  In the following six months, neither side demonstrated the least inclination to alter its stated position.  For their part, the Soviets never expressed any intent either to negotiate seriously or, as an analysis by the American embassy in Moscow noted, abandon their “own gigantic atomic research project.”  In one of the rare recorded instances of a private diplomatic exchange, the Russian diplomat A. A. Sobolev told Franklin A. Lindsay, an aide to Baruch, that the Soviet Union was not interested in the Baruch proposals but sought “freedom to pursue its own policies in complete freedom and without any interference or control from the outside.”  Discouraged by the exchange, Lindsay concluded afterwards that stopping bomb production would in “no way induce the Russians to accept any form of international inspection and control.”  He added that this “strongly indicates that no general understanding based on mutual trust and cooperation is possible between the two systems of government.”