SHARING ATOM SECRETS

Press, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue 26856, 8 October 1952, Page 9

SHARING ATOM SECRETS

Britain May Seek New Terms

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 12.30, a.m.) WASHINGTON, October 7.

Britain’s atom bomb and the fact that the British are under no obligation to tell the United States anything about it is the most significant development in British-American relations since the British loan at the end of the war, says Michael Amrine, a former managing editor of the “Bulletin of Atomic Energy Scientists,*' in an article written for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He adds that jubHant headlines in London claimed “Bomb makes Britain first-class Power again.” That may be stretching it a bit, but informed sources in Washington say there is no doubt that Britain once again will offer to exchange atomic information —but on far different terms than the exchange has been in recent years.

Six years ago the United States passed the McMahon Act, which in one swift stroke made it illegal for the United States to carry on an information arrangement that had been solemnly pledged by Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt at Quebec in 1943. Now that law must be changed if the countries are to be partners again—and it is almost a certainty that it will be changed. It may even be that the shrewd Mr Churchill, a hard bargainer. will not initiate the overtures to restore the partnership which built the first bomb, for none knows better than he that the present policy of secrecy has been one of America’s most momentous failures. He could wait for the United States to ask. He says the • United States secret policy has so arranged itself that its worst enemies obtained atom bombs while its best friends did not. '.‘But the Russian bombs did not teach us our lesson, and our policy went still further. We are now at the point where our friends have made their own bombs, and for this they owe us nothing. They did the job by themselves. *

“If the art of diplomacy be defined simply as managing your foreign affairs so that you help youiu friends and hinder your enemies, United States secrecy and the series of decisions by accident and default can be seen as diplomatic masterpieces. Thev may be studied In the of the future as masterpieces—masterpieces of vanity, short-sighted nationalism and ordinary stupidity.”