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Anglo-American nuclear relations from the mid-1950s on are marked by Britain's attempt to sustain its international significance as a Great Power even while it depended on a sustained flow of US nuclear secrets to build an ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent that could contribute usefully to the defence of Western Europe. A study of Anglo-American debates over the proliferation risks of gas-centrifuge enrichment in the late 1960s provides an ideal case study to illustrate the persistence of the tensions over the exchange of sensitive knowledge in the ‘civilian’ domain that had dominated the earlier negotiations over weapons science and technology. The United Kingdom, as one of the primary signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, thought it crucial to alert Washington to the dangers to the treaty posed by a revolutionary new enrichment process that threatened to ‘democratise’ the production of fissile material. US officials did not share their anxieties. Their major concern was to protect their technological lead and to use it as a political weapon to hem in Britain and those European allies who were developing gas-centrifuge enrichment. The British were once more made aware of the inequality inscribed in the special nuclear relationship deriving from the United States’ technological superiority.
Notes
1. This development was drawn to my attention by S. Schrafstetter and S. Twigge, ‘Spinning into Europe: Britain, West Germany and the Netherlands: Uranium Enrichment and the Development of the Gas Centrifuge, 1964–1970’, Contemporary European History, xi, no. 2 (2002), 253–72; S. Twigge, ‘A Baffling Experience. Technology Transfer, Anglo-American Nuclear Relations, and the Development of the Gas Centrifuge, 1964–1970’, History and Technology, xix, no. 2 (2003), 151–63; S. Schrafstetter and S. Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon. Europe, the United States and the Struggle for Nonproliferation, 1945–1970 (Westport, 2004); I have developed Twigge's argument in J. Krige, ‘Die Führungsrolle der USA und der transnationale Koproduktion von Wissen’ in B. Greiner, T.B. Mueller, and C. Weber (eds), Macht und Wissen im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2011), 68–86. There is an English translation in Humana_mente, xvi (April 2011), 33–52.
2. C. Bright and M. Geyer, ‘Regimes of World Order. Global Integration and the Production of Difference in Twentieth-Century World History’ in J.H. Bentley, R. Bridenthal, and A. Young (eds), Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Honolulu, 2005), 202–38 emphasise the construction of world order as a dimension of US foreign policy and couple it explicitly with US technological and intellectual leadership (228). See also D.C. Engerman, ‘American Knowledge and Global Power’, Diplomatic History, xxxi, no. 4 (2007), 599–622.
3. The vast literature includes H. Brands, ‘Non-Proliferation and the Dynamics of the Middle Cold War: The Superpowers, the MLF and the NPT’, Cold War History, vii, no. 3 (2007), 389–423 and M. Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace. The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, 1999).
4. For the term see S.J. Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid. The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present (Chapel Hill, 2010).
5. The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 5 March 1970, 21 U.S.T. 483, 729 U.N.T.S.
6. On the special nuclear relationship see J. Baylis (ed), Anglo-American Relations Since 1939. The Enduring Alliance (Manchester, 1997); J. Baylis, ‘Exchanging Nuclear Secrets: Laying the Foundations of the Anglo-American Nuclear Relationship’, Diplomatic History, xxv, no. 1 (2001), 33–61; T.J. Botti, The Long Wait. The Forging of the Anglo-American Nuclear Alliance, 1945–1958 (New York, 1987); I. Clark, Nuclear Diplomacy and the Special Relationship. Britain's Deterrent and America, 1967–1972 (Oxford, 1994); J. Melissen, The Struggle for Nuclear Partnership. Britain, the United States, and the Making of an Ambiguous Alliance, 1952–1959 (Gronginen, 1993); A. Pierre, Nuclear Politics. The British Experience with an Independent Strategic Force, 1939–1970 (London, 1972).
7. W. Lafeber, ‘Technology and U.S. Foreign Relations’, Diplomatic History, xxiv, no. 1 (2000), 1–19, at 2.
8. O.A. Westad, ‘The New International History of the Cold War: Three (Possible) Paradigms’, Diplomatic History, xxiv, no. 4 (2000), 551–65.
9. For an overview linking history of science and technology with history of US foreign policy, see J. Krige, ‘Foreign Relations and Diplomacy, Post World War II’ in H. Slotten (ed), The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Scientific, Medical and Technological History (Oxford, forthcoming). See also Krige, ‘Maintaining America's Competitive Technological Advantage’.
10. A.L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State. America's Anti-Statism and its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, 2000), chapter 5; M.J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954 (Cambridge, 1998).
11. On the McMahon Act in particular see Gregg Herken, ‘“A Most Deadly Illusion”: the Atomic Secret and American Nuclear Weapons Policy, 1945–1950’, Pacific Historical Review, xlix, no. 1 (1980), 51–76.
12. See Baylis, ‘Exchanging Nuclear Secrets’; Botti, The Long Wait; Melissen, The Struggle.
13. Botti, The Long Wait, 224–6.
14. Botti, The Long Wait, 234.
15. On some of the current implications of this debate see J. Krige, ‘The Proliferation Risks of Gas Centrifuge Enrichment at the Dawn of the NPT. New Light on the Negotiating History’, Non-Proliferation Review, xix, no. 2 (2012), 219–27.
16. R. Scott Kemp, ‘The End of Manhattan: How the Gas Centrifuge Changed the Quest for Nuclear Weapons’, Technology and Culture, liii, no. 2 (2012), 272–305.
17. N.L. Franklin, ‘Looking Back to 1959’, The Nuclear Engineer, xxvi, no. 1 (1985), 3–12; S. Whitley, ‘The Uranium Centrifuge’, Physics in Technology, x (1979), 26–33; R.F. Mozley, The Politics and Technology of Nuclear Proliferation (Seattle, 1998).
18. R. Scott Kemp, ‘Nonproliferation Strategy in the Centrifuge Age’ (PhD dissertation, Princeton University, June 2010), chapter 2. See also Scott Kemp, ‘The End of Manhattan’.
19. G. Zippe, The Development of Short Bowl Centrifuges, University of Virginia, Division of Engineering Physics, Research Laboratories for the Engineering Sciences, July 1960 (US AEC Oak Ridge Operations Report ORO-315).
20. Kemp, ‘Nonproliferation’, 38–41; Franklin, ‘Looking Back’, 1–2.
21. US Telegram, 15 April 1968, NARA [United States National Archives, Record Group 59, Entry A1(5618), Lot 74D11], Folder S.23 Gas Centrifuge [Technology, 1969], box 22.
22. Summarised, for example, in ‘Anglo/U.S. Relations in the Nuclear Field’, Paper prepared for Cabinet Ministerial Committee on Nuclear Policy, Centrifuge Collaboration, 19 May 1969, [Kew, UK] T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], CAB[inet Office Papers]134/314.
23. G.T. Seaborg with B.S. Loeb, Stemming the Tide: Arms Control in the Johnson Years (Lexington, MA, 1987), 262.
24. William Burr, at the National Security Archives, recently released a set of US archival materials pertaining to gas-centrifuge enrichment that confirmed my analysis in this paper. Some of his findings were added in proof.
25. Franklin, ‘Looking Back’; Whitley, ‘Uranium Centrifuge’. R. Scott Kemp, ‘Gas Centrifuge Theory and Development: A Review of U.S. Programs’, Science and Global Security, xvii (2009), 1–17 points out that in practice the separating power increases with the square, not the fourth power of the rotational velocity, as in the ideal case.
26. Scott Kemp, ‘Gas Centrifuge Theory’, Table 1.
27. UKAEA, ‘The Production of Enriched Uranium’, 26 July 1967, TNA, PR[im]EM[inister's Papers]13/2004.
28. Gas-diffusion plants had a low separation factor per stage. A long cascade of 1,200 stages was needed to enrich uranium sufficiently for reactor fuel, and that in turn called for large amount of electrical power for the compressors that pumped the gas (uranium hexafluoride) between the stages; see Whitley, ‘Ultracentrifuge’, 26–33.
29. The facility at Capenhurst had been mothballed in 1962–3 in response to a decline in demand for highly enriched uranium (HEU) for military purposes and, until 1965, the plant ran at the minimum level needed to maintain gaseous-diffusion technology and to produce slightly enriched uranium for the reactor programme: see R. Moore, Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality. Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958–1964 (Basingstoke, 2010), 195–9. It was reactivated in 1965 to meet the needs of the new Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor programme. ‘House of Commons Debate, 9th December 1965, Statement by the Minister of Technology, Capenhurst’, TNA, PREM13/2004. See also R. Williams, The Nuclear Power Decisions. British Policies, 1953–78 (London, 1980), 133.
30. AWB (Anthony Wedgwood Benn) to Prime Minister, 4 March 1968, TNA, PREM13/2004.
31. DWH (Denis Healey, Secretary of State for Defense) to Prime Minister, 11 March 1968, TNA, PREM13/2004.
32. AWB to Prime Minister, ‘ACARUS’, undated, but around 20 Dec. 1967, TNA, PREM13/2004. ACARUS was the code name for the centrifuge project.
33. T. O’Toole, ‘Cheap Way to Make U-235 Reported’, Washington Post, 27 Feb. 1968.
34. Memo Burke Trend to Prime Minister, 22 Feb. 1968, TNA CAB 164/732.
35. Zuckerman Working Party, MISC 183 (68) 1, ‘Report on Co-operation with Europe on Nuclear Energy’, 14 March 1968, TNA, F[oreign and] C[ommonwealth] O[ffice papers], 55/111.
36. Zuckerman to Prime Minister, ‘Cooperation with Europe on Nuclear Energy’ (MISC 183 (68) 1), 14 March 1968, TNA, PREM13/2004.
37. C.J. Audland to Sir E. Peck, Conversation with the German Scientific Attaché, 28 May 1958, TNA, CAB164/732.
38. Zuckerman, ‘Centrifuge Development. Record of Anglo/German Relations in Bonn, 9th July 1968’, dated 19 Aug. 1968, TNA, FCO55/14; Paper MISC 183 (68) 12, ‘Possible Anglo/German Collaboration in Centrifuge Development’, 15 July 1968, signed S. Zuckerman, TNA, FCO16/252.
39. Anthony Wedgwood Benn to the Prime Minister, 9 April 1968, TNA, CAB 164/732. See also Mozley, Nuclear Proliferation, 108–10.
40. Zuckerman, ‘Centrifuge Development’, 19 Aug. 1968, TNA, FCO55/14.
41. For a more detailed discussion of the European political dimension, see Schrafstetter and Twigge, ‘Spinning’.
42. This is the way Wilson presented it to German Minister Stoltenberg. Extract from a meeting in Bonn, 12 Feb. 1969, TNA, PREM13/2555.
43. Memo Benn to Prime Minister, 4 March 1968, TNA, PREM13/2004.
44. Zuckerman to the Home Secretary, 10 March 1969, TNA, PREM 13/2555.
45. Flash Telegram Foreign Office to Washington, ‘Uranium Enrichment by the Gas Centrifuge Process’, 10 April 1968, TNA, FCO55/111.
46. Memo ‘Non-Proliferation’ under cover from a memo signed by T.W. Garvey, 11 April 1966, TNA, FCO55/111.
47. Memo under cover of a note from T. Garvey, 11 April 1968, TNA, FCO55/111.
48. Flash Telegram Foreign Office to Washington, 10 April 1968, TNA, FCO55/111.
49. Unsigned, untitled memo, dated 15 April 1968, USNA, fo. S.23 Gas Centrifuge, box 22.
50. Gore-Booth to Dean, Washington, ‘Implications of Gas Centrifuge Development for the Non-Proliferation Treaty’, and attached ‘Talking Points’ prepared by the Atomic Energy and Disarmament Department in the Foreign Office, 29 April 1968, TNA, FCO10/207.
51. Hope-Jones to Peck, ‘The Centrifuge Process and the U.K. Safeguards Offer’, 30 April 1968, TNA, FCO10/207.
52. Ibid.
53. Audland to Peck, 18 April 1968, TNA, FCO10/207; Draft telegram to Washington, 18 April 1968, TNA, FCO10/207; Letter Falkley to Hope-Jones, 25 April 1968, TNA, FCO10/207; ‘Redraft of Paragraphs 7 to 10 of MISC 191(68)4(Revised)’, Atomic Energy and Disarmament Department, Foreign Office, undated, but about this time, TNA, FCO10/207.
54. Audland to Peck, 18 April 1968, TNA, FCO10/207.
55. Maitland to Hope-Jones, 27 Feb. 1969, along with the briefing notes for the Prime Minister on ‘Centrifuge Collaboration’, TNA, FCO55/268.
56. The literature includes Hal Brands, ‘Non-Proliferation and the Dynamics of the Middle Cold War’, from which the reach/grasp metaphor is borrowed; M. Küntzel, Bonn and the Bomb. German Politics and the Nuclear Option (London, 1995); Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid, chapter 9; T.A. Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe. In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, 2003); Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace. Schrafstetter and Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon, chapter 5, and Schrafstetter and Twigge, ‘Spinning’ specifically deal with the centrifuge.
57. Küntzel, Bonn, 90. This is just an example of the stream of invective in Germany that greeted the sinking of the MLF. See also S. Schrafstetter, ‘The Long Shadow of the Past: History, Memory and the Debate over West Germany's Nuclear Status, 1954–69’, History and Memory, xvi, no. 1 (2004), 118–45. See also Schrafstetter and Twigge, Avoiding Armageddon, 182 et seq.
58. Seaborg, Stemming, 359.
59. New York Times, 8 July 1968.
60. R.J. Granieri, ‘Odd Man Out? The CDU-CSU, Ostpolitik, and the Atlantic Alliance’ in M. Schulz and T.A. Schwartz (eds), The Strained Alliance. U.S. – European Relations from Nixon to Carter (German Historical Institute, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 83–101 at 93.
61. Küntzel, Bonn, 159.
62. Benn to Prime Minister, ‘European Nuclear Policy’, 14 Mar. 1968, TNA, PREM13/2004.
63. C.J. Audland, ‘Gas Centrifuge Collaboration. Draft Paragraphs for Inclusion in a Paper to be Submitted to Cabinet by the Minister of Technology and the Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’, TNA, FCO66/78.
64. R.C. Hope-Jones to Audland, ‘Gas Centrifuge Collaboration’, 29 Nov. 1968, TNA, FCO66/78.
65. M.J. Newington to Killich, ‘Centrifuge Collaboration: Germany and the N.P.T.’, 21 May 1969, TNA, FCO66/79.
66. Hope-Jones to Audland, 29 Nov. 1968, TNA, FCO66/78.
67. Unsigned, untitled memo, dated 15 April 1968, USNA, fo. S.23 Gas Centrifuge, box 22.
68. Ibid.
69. Letter Thompson to Holifield, 8 Aug 1969, Glenn T. Seaborg, Office Diary, Folder-Page, 104139, Seaborg papers, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
70. McNamara to Seaborg, 23 May 1964, Nuclear Testing Archive, Las Vegas, NV, document NV0903211, cited in http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/2012/5/30/weekly-documents-the-centrifuge-conundrum-19641968/
71. Seaborg, Stemming, 263.
72. Cited by Scott Kemp, ‘Nonproliferation’, 93.
73. Spurgeon Keeny to Walt Rostow, ‘Press Release on Gas Centrifuge Technology’, 24 March 1967, L[yndon] B[aines] J[ohnson Library, Austin, TX], N[ational] S[ecurity] F[ile of Charles E. Johnson], folder Nuclear[– Gas Centrifuge Technology], box 33. The Nth-country problem was independent of the centrifuge; the new technology simply made widespread nuclear dissemination even more likely.
74. USAEC Press Release, ‘AEC Sets New Policy on Gas Centrifuge Development’, 21 March 1967, LBJ, NSF, fo. Nuclear, box 33.
75. Seaborg to Rostow, 10 March 1967, LBJ, NSF, fo. Nuclear, box 33.
76. Telegrams 3552, 3553 from Washington to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 6 Dec. 1968, TNA, PREM13/2555.
77. Telegram 3553, Washington to Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 6 Dec. 1968, TNA, PREM13/2555.
78. Ibid.
79. Summarised, for example, in ‘Anglo/U.S. Relations in the Nuclear Field’, Paper prepared for Cabinet Ministerial Committee on Nuclear Policy, Centrifuge Collaboration, 19 May 1969, TNA, CAB134/314.
80. For details see Twigge, ‘Baffling’; Krige, ‘Maintaining’.
81. This is discussed at length in J. Krige, ‘Hybrid Knowledge. The Transnational Coproduction of the Gas Centrifuge for Uranium Enrichment in the late 1960s’, British J. for the History of Science, xlv, no. 2 (2012), 337–57.
82. ‘Centrifuge Technology. Record of the United States/United Kingdom Talks Held […]in Cabinet Office, Whitehall, London, S.W.1’, 4 and 5 March 1969, TNA, FCO55/265.
83. Zuckerman to Prime Minister, ‘Centrifuge Collaboration. Enquiry by Lord Penney, Sir Alfred Pugsley and Mr. T.C. Hetherington’, 2 June 1969, TNA, PREM13/2556.
84. Zuckerman to Prime Minister, ‘Centrifuge Collaboration. Anglo-United States Relations in the Nuclear Field’, 21 May 1969, TNA, PREM13/2556.
85. ‘United States/United Kingdom Relations in the Nuclear Field’, attached to memo Sykes to Killick, 1 April 1969, FCO55/269, TNA.
86. Record of a Meeting on 3 May at the Office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Washington D.C., TNA, PREM 13/2556.
87. ‘Report of Enquiry Relating to Restricted data on Centrifuge Design and Construction […]’, 30 May 1969, TNA, FCO55/268; Letter Zuckerman to Prime Minister, 2 June 1969, TNA, PREM13/2556.
88. The official history is R.B. Kehoe, The Enriching Troika. A History of Urenco to the Year 2000 (Marlow, 2000).
89. Glenn T. Seaborg, Office Diary entry, 11 Nov. 1968, copy in Nuclear Testing Archives, Las Vegas, NV, document 0910540, cited in http://nuclearsecrecy.com/blog/2012/5/30/weekly-documents-the-centrifuge-conundrum-19641968/
90. Memo Nelson Sievering to USAEC Commissioner Theos Thompson, ‘Reflections on the Gas Centrifuge Meetings with the UIK’, 31 July 1969, NARA, Folder S.23 Gas Centrifuge, box 22.
91. Letter Thompson to Holifield, 8 Aug 1969.
92. As late as 1974 the United States supplied 100% of the enriched uranium needs of the ‘free world’, Seaborg, Stemming, 265. See also W. Walker and M. Lönnroth, Nuclear Power Struggles. Industrial Competition and Proliferation Control (London, 1983).
93. S. Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men and Missiles. An Autobiography, 1964–88 (London, 1988), 445.
94. These threats are described in more detail in Krige, Hybrid Knowledge.
95. Botti, The Long Wait, 234.
96. Baylis, ‘Exchanging Nuclear Secrets’ stresses reciprocity as the condition for the possibility of the ‘special nuclear relationship’.