The United Nations Atomic Energy Commission was first convened in June 1946. It rapidly proliferated into more than a dozen committees, working groups and other subsidiary bodies - some even meeting in several different guises such as "meetings", "informal discussions", and "informal conver-sations".8 This proliferation and these metamorphoses more often than not were designed only to shift delicate discussions from one forum to a slightly different one, in the vain hope that through such procedural maneuvering sub-stantive issues might somehow be resolved.
The main lines of the conflict were quickly drawn. The United States presented the Baruch Plan, first in outline to the Commission itself and then in greater detail in Sub- Committee No. 1. In general these proposals soon obtained the approval of the majority of UNAEC, and with the adoption of the Commission1 s first report9 they in effect became the majority plan.
The Soviet Union presented its proposals at the second meeting of the Commission.10 These foresaw first of all the conclusion of an international convention to "prohibit the production and employment of weapons based on the use of atomic energy for the purpose of mass destruction". This treaty would have: included a pledge against any use of atomic weapons, prohibited their production and storage, and required the destruction within three months of all existing stocks of such weapons; each party would also be obliged to pass legislation providing severe penalties for any violations of these under-takings. On the entry into force of the convention (upon ratification by half the signatory States, including all the permanent members of the Security Council) it would automatically become binding on all States of the world.
Mr. Gromyko proposed that UNAEC give priority to the drafting of such a convention and only then turn to the organization of systems of control and the elaboration of sanctions. Simultaneously another branch of the Commis-sion should elaborate recommendations concerning practical measures for promoting the exchange of information on all aspects of atomic e n e r g y . It is unnecessary to retrace here the procedural curlicues by which the protagonists in this three-year marathon debate sought to maintain and advance their different positions, or even to record the few concessions made and
the limited agreements reached.11 To the background of the IAEA it is merely-necessary to recall the principal points of conflict — almost all of which became apparent in the first few meetings of UNAEC and persisted until its demise.
(a) Relationship between IADA and the Security Council, and the problem of the veto
As mentioned above, the American and later the majority position was that no control system could be effective if it was subject to a veto by one of the powers that might be violating it; consequently IADA must never be fully subject to the Security Council and should therefore be established by a sepa-rate treaty and not by mere UN resolutions. The Soviet position was that great-power unanimity was a fundamental and unchangeable feature of the United Nations system and that IADA, which would play a vital part in assuring world security, should be fully subject to the Council.12 This position had already been signalled at the Moscow Foreign Ministers1 meeting, where the Soviet representative successfully insisted on the unusual arrangement that UNAEC would be created by the General Assembly but would report and be subject to the Security Council.
(b) The priority of prohibition or control
The Soviet representative asserted that a decision must first be made on prohibiting nuclear weapons before attention need be paid to the system for controlling their production. The majority of UNAEC felt that prohibition without control would be empty and dangerous - and since the system of control would be more difficult to negotiate and implement than a mere pro-hibition, consideration of control must come first.
(c) The required intensity of control
The Baruch Plan and later the majority of UNAEC, accepting the logic of the Ache son-Lilienthal Report, agreed that effective control could only be exercised through an operating authority rather than through one performing merely external inspections. The Soviet Union never conceded the necessity for this massive international intervention into the domestic sphere and suggested that a system of reporting, with perhaps limited inspections, would be enough to support a system that must ultimately depend mainly on recipro-cal good faith.
UNAEC presented three reports to the Security Council. In the F i r s t Report,13 adopted on 30 December 1946 by a vote of 10:0:2, the Commission largely endorsed the Baruch Plan - in particular with respect to the scien-tific and technical feasibility of adequate international safeguards on peaceful nuclear activities, if these were carried out by a single international author-ity responsible for both operations and control, to be applied to all stages of the production and use of nuclear fuels. The Second Report,14 adopted on 11 September 1947 by a vote of 10:1:1, dealt with two separate subjects:
specific proposals on the operational and developmental functions to be en-trusted to the proposed authority (including: research and development acti-vities; location and mining of ores; processing and verification of source
material; stockpiling, production and distribution of nuclear fuels; design and construction of isotope separation plants and of nuclear reactors) and on its rights and limitations in relation to research, surveys and exploration;
and an analysis of the differences between the majority and minority positions as these became clear during the Commission1 s consideration of amendments to the First Report that had been proposed by the Soviet Union in the Security Council or directly in the Commission). The Third Report,15 adopted on 17 May 1948 by a vote of 9:2:0, informed the Security Council that UNAEC had "reached an impasse" so "that no useful purpose could be served by carrying on negotiations at a Commission level" and recommended that the Council transmit the three reports to the General Assembly.
The Security Council accepted the recommendation of the Commission and transmitted its reports to the General Assembly16 - a decision that could be taken by a procedural vote. After heated debate at the third Assembly (including consideration in the First Committee and in a special sub-committee thereof) the Assembly on 4 November 1948 endorsed, by vote of 40:6:4, the plan that had been recommended by the majority of the UNAEC; the reso-lution also called for the Commission to resume its discussions and for special consultations among the six permanent members of the Commission?7 Though the Commission therefore lingered on, it accomplished no further work and prepared no substantial reports in the few meetings it and its Working Group held up to July 1949. Whether or not any p r o g r e s s could have been made in developing the plan for IADA, if either the majority or the minority had yielded on the contentious points at issue between them, became academic when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in August 1949 and the United Kingdom followed suit in October 1952: these events, con-sidered together with the stockpile of nuclear materials that the United States had built up in the intervening cold-war years, made it clear that never again would a complete system of atomic energy control be possible, since even if from a given date all future production and use of nuclear materials could be rigidly controlled there would be no way of discovering the extent of any hoards of previously produced nuclear materials that might have been hidden away by any of the nuclear powers.
Although the attention of the Commission might at this point have been shifted to some new plan to prevent the further proliferation of nuclear weapons, it was never again convened after the first Soviet explosion. UNAEC was given its long delayed burial on 11 January 1952 when the General Assembly finally dissolved it.18
Buried at the same time was its foetal offspring - IADA, the first and much too ambitiously conceived organization designed to control, and for that purpose to operate, all substantial nuclear energy programmes through-out the world. Left behind, besides the memory of the extensive acrimonious debates which prejudiced any new approach to the subject, was a legacy of deeply ingrained positions on certain problems (e.g., attitudes for and against strong safeguards, the potential operational role of an international atomic energy organization, and the question of subjecting such an organization to the Security Council and its veto), which later rose to haunt the founders of the IAEA as they tackled their task with renewed energy in the post-Stalin and post-Korean War thaw.
NOTES
1 Among many useful accounts of these negotiations, attention might be called to Bernhard G. Bechhoefer, Postwar Negotiations for Arms Control, The Brookings Institution, Washington (1961).
2 This instrument was considered to be an international agreement and was consequently registered by the United States with the United Nations (see 1 U . N . T . S . 123). At least the United States still lists it as a treaty in force (see Treaties in Force on January 1, 1968, US State Dep't Publ. 8355). Its text appears, inter alia, in Multilateral Agreements, Legal Series No. 1, IAEA, Vienna (1959) 1.
3 Section VII of the Soviet-Anglo-American Communique of 27 December 1945, "The Establishment by the United Nations of a Commission for the Control of Atomic Energy", reproduced in International Control of Atomic Energy: Growth of a Policy, US State Dep't Publ. 2702 (1946) [hereinafter "Growth of a Policy"].
4 As the first substantive resolution passed by the Assembly, it was numbered Resolution 1(1). For convenience, General Assembly Resolutions will hereinafter be identified as follows: UNGA/RES/1(I).
5 Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy, US State Dep't Publ.2498 (March 1946).
6 This technical conclusion is probably one of the least sound parts of the Report.
7 Speech by Mr. B.M. Baruch at die 1st meeting of UNAEC (14 June 1946), and US Memoranda Nos. 1-3 submitted to Sub-Committee No.l of UNAEC on 2, 5 and 12 July 1946. All these are reproduced in Growth of a Policy, supra note 3, Appendixes 13-16.
8 Lists of these organs and of their meetings and records can be found in Index to Documents, 1 Jan. 1946 -30 April 1951 (UN doc. A E C / C . l / 8 1 / R e v . l ) ; in Check List of UN Documents, Part 3 : Atomic Energy Commission, 1946-1952 (UN doc. STI/LIB/SER. F/3); and in The International Control of Atomic Energy:
Policy at the Crossroads, US State Dep't Publ.3161 (June 1948), Appendix 1. A good account of the UNAEC appears in Chapter 1 of The United Nations and Disarmament (UNPublication Sales No.67.1.9(1967)).
9 UN doc.AEC/18/Rev.l (31 Dec.1946), reproduced in US State Dep't Publ.2737 (1947).
10 Also reproduced in Growth of a Policy, supra note 3, Appendix 22.
11 A quasi-official summary can be found in Yearbook of the United Nations 1946 - 4 7 , pp.444 -451; 1948-49, pp.344-61; 1950, pp.415-19.
12 In two years the Soviet position shifted enough to permit the concession that no veto would apply to the internal decisions of IADA; however, violations of its controls would still have to be referred to the Security Council - see records of 21st meeting of UNAEC Sub-Committee N o . l (19 June 1947), summarized in Yearbook of the United Nations 1946-47, p . 4 5 1 . Compare the procedure applicable to the IAEA, as described in Sections 8 . 4 . 3 and 2 1 . 7 . 2 . 4 .
13 Supra note 9.
14 UN doc. AEC/26 (11 Sept.1947), reproduced in US State Dep't Publ.2932 (1947).
15 UN doc.AEC/31/Rev.l (17 May 1948), reproduced in US State Dep't Publ.3179 (1948).
16 SC/RES/52 (1948) (22 June 1948).
17 UNGA/RES/191 (III)(4 Nov. 1948).
18 UNGA/RES/502(VI)(ll Jan.1952), para.2.
The Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency was formulated in just short of three years.1 At the time this period appeared excessively long and considerable impatience was expressed. Nevertheless, if one studies the numerous separate stages of these negotiations and recalls the extensive and ultimately fruitless haggling less than a decade earlier on the proposed IADA, and if one also considers how much longer the negotiation of less important and basically non-controversial international instruments often takes, we can gain a new appreciation of the intensive work that was achieved at what must, in the light of diplomatic practice, be considered a fairly brisk pace.
The formulation of the Statute was accomplished in several successive stages, which for the most part can conveniently be separated chronologi-cally. At each stage the forum of consideration changed, and these shifts resulted in a shuttle effect in which the evolving draft was passed back and forth from a small (though ever-increasing) group of States to organs in which practically the entire world community was represented. Thus the process of formulating the Statute was itself conditioned by two of the principal issues
TABLE 2A. REPRESENTATIVE ORGANS
CENTRAL (Size)a GENERAL
Formulation of the Statute
1954 UN General Assembly ( 9t h)
1955 Negotiating Group (8)
1955 UN General Assembly (10th) 1956 Working Level Meeting (12)
1956 Co-ordination Committee (12) Conference on the Statute
Interim 1956-57 Preparatory Commission (18)
Agency 1957-63 Board of Governors (23)
,r>,.o „ J r ~ ,r,^ General Conference 1963- Board of Governors (25)
a The composition of these "Central" organs is given in Annex 3 . 1 ; it should be noted that the core group of States is largely invariant.
21
relating to the contents of that instrument: what should be the relative roles of the central and of the general representative organs of the Agency, and what should be the size and composition of the former. To anticipate the material in the present Chapter, as well as that in Part B below, this issue can be elucidated from Table 2A.
2 . 1 . PRESIDENT EISENHOWER'S INITIATIVE
There is no dispute that the impulse to create the International Atomic Energy Agency came from the speech President Dwight D. Eisenhower addressed to the 8th regular session of the General Assembly of the United Nations on 8 December 1953.2 He proposed:
"114. The governments principally involved, to the extent permitted by elementary prudence, should begin now and continue to make joint contributions from their stockpiles of normal uranium and fissionable materials to an international atomic energy agency. We would expect that such an agency would be set up under the aegis of the United Nations...
"116. Undoubtedly, initial and early contributions to this plan would be small in quantity. However, the proposal has the great virtue that it can be undertaken without the irritations and mutual suspicions incident to any attempt to set up a completely acceptable system of world-wide inspection and control.
"117. The atomic energy agency could be made responsible for the impounding, storage and protection of the contributed fissionable and other materials. The ingenuity of our scientists will provide special safe conditions under which such a bank of fissionable material can be made essentially immune to surprise seizure.
"118. The more important responsibility of this atomic energy agency would be to devise methods whereby this fissionable material would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind. Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved a r e a s of the world.
"119. Thus the contributing Powers would be dedicating some of their strength to serve the needs rather than the fears of mankind."
The three-fold object of this proposal was thus:
(a) "To begin to diminish the potential destructive power of the world's atomic stockpiles" — i . e . , an arms-reduction (but not a disarmament) measure to be accomplished by building up under custody a neutralized
"pool"3 of nuclear material in the proposed agency.
(b) To use the impounded material for peaceful applications throughout the world — i . e . , a technological and possibly an economic assistance measure, in which the agency would act principally as a "banker"3 of nuclear materials.
(c) To encourage the people of the world by showing that the great powers were more concerned with human aspirations than with armament, and to break the existing disarmament deadlockby opening up "a new channel
for peaceful discussion and initiative" that would aid the world "to shake off the inertia imposed by fear and . . . to make positive progress towards peace" — i . e . . a moral, psychological initiative.
Though the President's speech was received with immediate acclaim and great enthusiasm, the Assembly was not asked so late in the year to take any action thereon at its current session.
The American Government, however, did not let matters rest with the presentation of these proposals.4 In addition to the initiatives related in the Sections below, the administration immediately took the first steps to enable it later to redeem the presidential promises, by submitting to Congress extensive amendments to the extremely restrictive Atomic Energy Act of 19465 which had barred almost all international co-operation and in-deed even contacts in this field. The resulting Act, which was signed into law on 30 August 1954,6 authorized the Government to engage in significant international co-operation and to give substantial assistance, subject in each case to the conclusion of a co-operation agreement cleared with Congress.
Thereupon working in almost assembly-line fashion, standardized bilateral agreements were negotiated and initialled (with 24 countries by July 1955 — and more followed later), and assistance promised and delivered under these agreements did much to arouse world-wide interest in atomic energy and thus helped sustain the momentum for the creation of the IAEA; less fortu-nately, however, this pattern and programme of bilateral co-operation (soon imitated, though to a more modest extent, by the other nuclearly developed countries), which was initially meant merely to fill the gap between the pro-posal for and the establishment of the Agency, later became perhaps its most serious competitor.
2 . 2 . CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION
In his address. President Eisenhower had especially mentioned the Soviet Union as one of the powers "principally involved", with which the arrange-ments leading to the realization of his proposals would have to be discussed in "private conversation". Consequently on 11 January 1954 the Secretary of State handed a note to the Soviet Ambassador which initiated a two-year correspondence in which 28 communications relating to the Agency were exchanged. This exchange can conveniently be divided into two phases: 13 notes exchanged between 11 January and 23 September 1954 (beginning of the 9th Session of the General Assembly) constituted an attempt at bilateral negotiation;7 15 notes, exchanged between 3 November 1954 and 27 January 1956, were in effect contrapuntal to the several subsequent stages of multilateral negotiation which the United States had in the meantime initiated and in which it was inviting the Soviet Union to join.8
2 . 2 . 1 . First phase
The first phase of the exchange did not prove to be particularly fruitful. The principal difficulty harked back to one of the major obstacles of the UNAEC
negotiations on IADA: can any international agreement be made on any aspects of the control of atomic energy without a prior o r at least simul-taneous agreement prohibiting all nuclear weapons? The Soviet Union again insisted that this must be done, and already on 30 January 1954 transmitted a draft declaration "concerning unconditional renunciation of the use of atomic, hydrogen and other forms of weapons of mass destruction"; it further charged that since even peaceful nuclear activities could lead to the p r o -duction of materials usable for bombs, the proposed stimulation of such ac-tivities throughout the world would actually lead to an intensification of the a r m s race.9 It was the later abandonment of this position which made Russian participation in the Agency possible.1 0
Nevertheless, even this correspondence made its contribution to the establishment of the Agency. In particular:
(a) The introductory notes contained the first attempt to establish a list
(a) The introductory notes contained the first attempt to establish a list