Date

Mar 23, 1960

Description

The AEC's report to the State Department generated concern over the proliferation risk of unclassified gas centrifuge research, but the Department had no clear answers. While Philip Farley, the secretary of state's adviser on atomic energy policy, believed that the Dutch and the West Germans might be able to impose export controls, he thought it might be more difficult to secure West German cooperation to classify the latest developments in the technology. The Germans were likely to be reluctant to classify because it could "raise suspicions" among their neighbors that they had a nuclear weapons program under way. An alternative was that the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) could request its members to classify the technology but this raised the risk that the information would become available to the French. So far the US AEC had been unable to "approve the French AEC for security." An alternative to classification by Euratom or classification by national governments would be "informal commercial restrictions."

Source

Department of Energy MDR release

Document published in following posting(s):

Early Atomic Energy Commission Studies Show Concern over Gas Centrifuge Proliferation Risk

Jun 23, 2012