Science: Lost Momentum

Back in 1953, President Eisenhower appeared before the Eighth U.N. General Assembly and stirred the imagination of the world with his Atoms-for-Peace proposal. His specific recommendation: an International Atomic Energy Agency that would distribute nuclear fuels, see to it that the material was used for peaceful purposes, ensure that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life.”

The original design was to make the benefits of the atom available through an international agency that could remove the curse of political commitment from the recipients and the charge of sinister intent from the donor. Small nations began happily making up shopping lists, envisioned reactors of their own turning out cheap and abundant energy in jungle, desert and mountains. But the program has steadily lost momentum.

Years of wrangling went by before the U.N. nations could even agree on setting up the agency (IAEA). In the two years since then, IAEA has acquired a headquarters in Vienna, a director-general (New York’s Sterling Cole, onetime chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy), and a staff of 403. But it has closed just one deal: this year it received 3,000 kilograms of natural uranium from Canada and sold it to Japan. Beyond that, IAEA can point only to a short list of minor accomplishments, including the establishment of a modestly equipped laboratory in the basement of Vienna’s Grand Hotel, the dispatch of survey missions to scattered parts of the earth, and a wordy record of seminars, conferences and symposia.

The fact is that the U.S. itself has been mainly responsible for IAEA’s paralysis. While pouring more money into the agency than any other nation ($4 million so far v. $850,000 from Russia), the U.S. has consistently bypassed it. Instead of funneling all atomic aid through IAEA, the U.S. has found it preferable to maintain direct bilateral agreements (43 at present) with have-not countries. One reason is that IAEA inspection teams would necessarily include Russians, giving them a chance to look over U.S. shoulders. The have-nots are more than willing to avoid the agency, too, since they can get their atomic help direct from the supplier rather than through the cumbersome machinery of international middlemen.

The world has become more sophisticated since Ike’s Atoms-for-Peace proposal, and the U.S. is no longer accused of trying to tie up smaller nations in its atomic apron strings. Last week, as IAEA’s 23-member board of governors met in Vienna to draw up a program for 1960, they faced the fact that IAEA has become an agency prepared to demonstrate something that no longer needs demonstrating. With its sights lowered, the organization is keeping itself in business as a sort of atomic information center dedicated to the unarguable proposition that atomic energy should be used for peaceful purposes under suitable safeguards—but lacking much to safeguard.