INFORMAL TALK AS DELIVERED YESTERDAY BY LEWIS L. STRAUSS, CHAIRMAN, UNITED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION, TO NATIONAL PRESS CLUB

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80B01676R000700140081-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: S
• Document Page Count: 11
• Document Creation Date: December 14, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 1, 2003
• Sequence Number: 81
• Publication Date: January 11, 1955
• Content Type: PAPER

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INFORMAL TALK AS DELIVERED YESTERDAY (JANUARY 11
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ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
This being the season of the year when businesses, having
completed their year-end inventories, are setting up their bal-
ance sheets and writing the first drafts of annual reports to
stockholders, it occurred to me to try and give you a "trial
balance" of the AEC. I don't mean by that to unload upon you
a lot of figures and statistics, Instead, I thought you might
be interested if I separated the debits and credits, -- the
things accomplished, and the things undone, or muffed, -- as
I see them from the marble sanctuary over on Constitution
Avenue.
In order to be able to conclude by enumerating the good
things, -- the assets -- I will begin with the debits.
The first item, and most important of these, it seems to
me, was the discovery that Malenkov wasn't talking through his
hat about what we call "a thermonuclear reaction", The Soviets
produced it, without any doubt, and it Is unintelligent to
decry their scientific competence, Proficiency in the technology
of nuclear weapons, and indeed of science and engineering gen-
erally, is not so much of an American monopoly as popular mis-
conception once would have had it. Of course, by contract
with our weapons tests, Russian atomic weapons tests according
to them are all benign. They remove mountains, change the
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course of rivers, and never, never have any dangerous aspects
or any baneful effects on the world, also according to them,
Only the tests conducted by the United States are wicked, war-
mongering, and horrendous affairs, Artful Soviet propaganda
has actually persuaded many people to, this fantastic belief, --
even in our own country. At any rate, Soviet progress in
weapons development is, or ought to be, a prime concern of
free people. Many feel it reduces the time within which the
world has to work out some sort of modus vivendi.
Item 2 in the debit column is criticism of the personnel
security program, which arose as a result of the case of
Dr. Oppenheimer, Periodically, the personnel security program
has given us grief ever since the beginning of the AEC, By
1950 we had evolved what we believed was a very fair procedure
to deal with security cases. It has been widely commended by
both men of law and men of science, It is a procedure that pro-
vides the individual, against whom charges have been brought,
with every protection we could think of, He has to be furnished
with a written catalogue of allegations; he can resign or
he can elect a hearing; if he elects a hearing, he can challenge
the persons selected for the special hearing board; he can be
represented by counsel; he can attend all hearings himself; he
can confront all witnesses, and he and his counsel can
cross-examine all the witnesses. He can appeal from an adverse
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decision to a board of review, and finally, he can absolutely
control the issue of whether or not existence of the proceedings
is to become known, In spite of all this, there are those who
feel that injustice is occasionally done, -- just as I suppose
is true of losers in actions before a court of law, Over the
years, we have tried to see what, if anything, can be done to
improve the procedures,
To this end, I wrote to all our Laboratory Directors in
November to say that we would ask them to meet with us here
for an exploration of the subject. The meeting is scheduled
to begin on Monday of next week, I have had a considerable cor-
respondence on this subject with individuals and organizations,
and no radically new ideas have come to my attention. We are,
however, going into the meeting with an open mind. Under present
procedures, it has been possible to protect the security of the
operations of the Government as well as the rights of the in-
dividual, with due regard to the interests and privileges of
both, I think it will never be possible, however, to satisfy
everyone even under the long-established rules of jurisprudence.
The recent records of protests made after fair trials before
juries, in the presence of our press and the press of other
countries, demonstrates this point,
Item 3, also on the debit side, would be the misunder-
standings about the Mississippi Valley Generating contract --
or the Dixon-Yates contract if you still prefer to call it that
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and I suppose it always will be called that. The contract,
itself, should be listed among the assets, And anticipating
some questions about this later, I will not now say more about
this contract or the two previous ones which were negotiated
with private utilities under the preceding Administration,
except that primarily the MVGC contract is different in two main
particulars: first, it is smaller than either of the other two,
and second, it had the misfortune to occur in a year when issues
were scarce. As my friend Roscoe Drummond said, they were
grasping at straws, Well, they got me! I don't know what will
come out of the SEC hearings on the capital setup, but I do
know that the MVGC contract is a better one that its uncriti-
cized predecessors because we benefited from our experience with
them, And I know also -- and this is important -- that the
AEC is not a part of any cabal or conspiracy to hurt the TVA.
My own background makes me a strong believer in free, private
enterprise and in the doctrine that, generally speaking, that
government governs best which governs least. But I have no
private war, cold or hot, with the TVA, and no connections,
material or sentimental, with any private company engaged in
the production of electrical power, now or in the past.
Debit item number 4 might be the uproar over the positions
of the Chairman and the Commissioners. This issue is dead as
far as I am concerned, but it was a liability during the early
months of the past year, and I might be thought evasive if I
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did not mention it in a totting up like this. When the new
Atomic Energy Act was being drafted by the Joint Committee,
they took note of the fact that the original McMahon Act was
silent as to the duties and responsibilities of the Commission-
ers and the Chairman, This fact produced difficulties from the
very outset. So the Committee draftsmen attempted to solve this
by making the Chairman "the principal officer", When I first
saw this, I think it was about the 8th of April, I wrote to
Chairman Cole to ask what the words meant because I didn't know
and I thought that the language might be ambiguous. Well,
just about then the storm broke and I was depicted as a power-
mad autocrat, and a lot of other not very complimentary things.
I've since been able to add to that collection and now have some
columns in which I am described as a wire-tapper, an eavesdrop-
per, a blackmailer, a short, natty promoter and, believe it or
not, an antisemite. But I do not think our auditor will let
me set up these epithets on the balance sheet since, if debits,
they are mine, not the AEC's.
At the end of the debit column I would note that none of
these liabilities has adversely affected the work of the Com-
mission, and none of the harassments which are personal to me,
has slowed the output: of weapons, the development of power, or
crippled the effectiveness of our enterprises in mines, mills,
chemical plants, reactors, laboratories,, and hospitals, as the
credit side of the balance sheet will show.
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The credit side of the ledger is ,pretty good.
Item 1 on the credit side, of course, is the atatoe of the
weapons program which is AEC's paramount responsibility. Natlzral-
ly, I cant go into much detail about it. It has never been
stinted by the Congress. It has had the devoted efforts of
absolutely top-flight teams of physicists, chemists and en-
gineers from the very beginning, and we still have these men
on the job, It has had the breaks in invention and in inspired
ideas and it has enjoyed the cooperation of all branches of the
Armed Forces, who from the kiekoff, have put their first teams
of brilliant officers into this assignment. The result is that
our stockpile of weapons is large, is growing rapidly, is diver-
sified to suit the needs of the services and the particular
tasks they are to accomplish in the unhappy event of war, Those
of us who served on the Commission in its early days never imag-
ined anything like it (I had better modify that to say that, at
least. ,.1 didn't). It is my honest belief that we are well ahead
of any competition at this time,
Item 2, on this side of the ledger is power, Electrical
energy from the atom has been the dream of the engineer since
the first chain reaction. Even back in 1946, we knew that as
a stunt we could light a few lamps with the heat from a pile.
But as recently as the spring of 1953, we thought it would be
some years before private industry would risk any amount of
private dollars in this development, However, already last
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September 6th, President Eisenhower broke ground at Shippingport
for what we call the PWR (the pressurized water reactor) which
by 1957 should be delivering 60,000 kw into the grid of the
Pittsburgh area and which represents a large investment of pri-
vate capital. This is the first of what we hope will be at least
one reactor a year for the next several years in the endeavor
to ge;, the cost of electricity so generated down to a competitive
basis with power from the conventional fuels, of course, there
are places on the world map where, even today, such power as
we can now produce would compete with energy from the burning of
coal and oil. You know, of course, about the Nautilus, and as
soon as her defective piping is replaced which is soon, she
will be ready to join the fleet. The packaged power reactor
which we are developing for the Army should be a reality by
1958.
All in all, we are in the power development field with
vigor.
Item 3 would be the new legislation. The effect of the
new law is one of great relaxation from the monopolistic pro-
visions of the old statute. American ingenuity through Ameri-
can business, can now enter the forbidden portals of atomic
energy and, with the proper safeguards, develop it not only for
the public benefit but for profit. We will be on our way back
to the American system. Details of licensing, pricing, etc.
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have been under study and as they are approved by the Commission,
will be announced -- as was done in part on yesterday.
Another effect of the new law has been to facilitate
atomic cooperation with our military allies on a realistic basis.
We had already arranged in the autumn of 1953 to exchange in-
formation with them about the effects of atomic weapons so
that they might better protect themselves in the event of
attack, Now, under the new law, we will be able to give them
certain other information as specified in the Act which will
intensify our value to them as allies and theirs to us, in
the event of war,
Item 4 would be the results of always interesting and
sometimes spectacular progress in the use of radiation in the
arts and sciences -- in medicine, biology, agriculture, chemis-
try and metallurgy, to name but a few. These advances would
require much too long even to catalogue here. The semiannual
reports of the Commission -- a new one is due to go to the
printer shortly -- are specific and detailed on these unclassi-
fied points,
Item 5. We have greatly expanded the areas of free in-
formation. Less and less one hears the Commission criticized
for its policies on security of information. We have published,
or released for publication, a flood of technical information.
Yet at the same time that we have relaxed security in.areas
where it is no longer justified by the nature of the material.
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I am convinced we have maintained and even intensified our
surveillance over the security of data which, under no circum""
stances, should ever be permitted to fall into enemy hands, It
used to be fashionable to scoff at our information security
procedures, I believe that climate has materially changed.
But of course you are the court of last resort,
Item 6, The most hopeful asset on the balance sheet is
the President's proposal of Atoms-for-Peace. I worked on
this with the President and his staff for months before he was
ready to announce it as he did in his great speech to the
General Assembly of the United Nations in December of last year.
And we have worked on it during the vicissitudes of Soviet
delays. As a start, we have allocated to the plan 100 kilo-
grams of fissionable material, not of weapons grade, and the
United Kingdom has allocated another 20 kilograms. Under other
provisions of the new Atomic Energy Act, this material may be
used, following bilateral agreements between the United States
and other countries, to provide the fuel elements for research
reactors in those countries. Or it may await the formation of
the International Agency, as also envisaged in the Act and as
proposed by the President in his speech to 'the .-U.N.
Ancillary to the President's plan is the International
Scientific Conference on the benign uses of atomic energy
which I proposed last April and which is now definitely
scheduled for this summer. The advisory committee to the
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Secretary General, of the United Nations, comprising represen-
tatives of 12 nations, will meet in New York next Monday to
consider -che detailed plans and agenda for the conference, I
naturally feel very good about this.
I f'nd that I can extend this list of assets beyond the
bounuc of time appropriate to remarks at this luncheon.
But n order to make the balance-sheet analogy complete,
there ought to be an item of "good will", and I think such an
item exists. For I believe that, to a greater extent than we
:'ealize, t1 -,e frc;e world knows that we are very strong and
that, unlike other strong nations in history, power has not
intoxicated us -- that on the contrary, we have been humble in
the face of the realization of our potential for great good or
for great evil.
This, gentlemen, is the report to stockholders with,
shall I say, the Scotch auditor's admonitory conclusion, E
and OE, "errors and omissions excepted". Thank you.
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MEMORANDUM FOR:
Mr. Dulles
ias seen this and concurs.
QATE)
FORM NO. 10.101 JAN 1952 (47)
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