Lawrence Livermore Speech

Keynote Address by Susan Eisenhower at the Concluding Conference of the "Atoms for Peace After 50 Years: The New Challenges and Opportunities" Project

November 13, 2003

Thank you for the chance to be here with you at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for this important anniversary. I must say I always knew that Dwight Eisenhower was a tough act to follow, but nevermore so than today and in front of this audience. I couldn't help thinking as I came in this morning and saw pictures of Edward Teller out in the hallway that he was one of the people who had some influence, I guess, over the direction that my life took in a rather interesting way.

Two big events happened as I was growing up. One was meeting Edward Teller when I was about eight or nine years old at a Christmas party that Jackie Cochran gave in California. I remember when we went into this party, it was on Christmas Eve, my mother pulled me aside and whispered, "Now, the man with the bushy eyebrows is the man who developed the hydrogen bomb," and my eyes got large and remained large ever since. The other important moment for me was the visit of Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 for the never-to-be-forgotten, two-week tour around the United States. During an impasse at Camp David, my grandfather decided the best way to see a breakthrough would be to board a helicopter with the Soviet Premier and bring him down to the farm at Gettysburg. There we sat on the front porch that was so beloved by my grandparents and had a very interesting tea with the Soviet Premier and the small group that came with him. He at that time had said that Eisenhower should bring his grandchildren to the Soviet Union, and I could tell instantly by looking at my parents' body language that this was a non-starter. After the meeting was over, we went out the front door and Khrushchev pulled a few things out of his pocket, four little red star pins that he placed on our blouses. The minute the helicopter took off, my mother said, "Give me those pins!" So, we took them off and she threw them away. We're still upset with her for that. They would have some historical value I suppose, but it was very clear that despite the fact that the Soviet Premier had been to the porch of my grandparents' house, he apparently was not a friend of the United States. We were admonished that evening at dinner that we should curb our enthusiasm that, indeed, this man did not wish the United States well. If he wasn't a friend of the U.S., why did he come in the first place? Such are the thoughts of children. But there we are.

Everyone in this room has reasons to be doing what you're doing. There may have been your own moments during the Cold War that set you on the path that you've been following. It has been a very moving fall for me to participate in a number of Atoms for Peace discussions because it truly was a revolutionary speech in many ways. It brought together so many important elements, not only related to our national security but also to our economic development, to create a strategic vision, not only for the United States but also for the rest of the world, this is indeed a great contribution. I guess I hadn't really focused on it too much until the beginning of this fall. Sometimes I've wondered to myself, would my grandfather be surprised that people all over the world have, perhaps, taken a few minutes of their day or maybe even a whole day to think about his seminal speech and the impact it has had on contemporary life? In an odd way, on the one hand, I think he would not have thought about it at all, being a modest person. On the other hand, what he had intended to do that day was clearly strategic in nature as he wrote, "It is with the book of history, not with the isolated pages, that the United States will ever wish to be identified."

And so, I'd like to offer some thoughts about what I think was behind the speech he gave and his thinking. I think nobody other than Dwight Eisenhower could have had quite as deep a sense of the contradictory nature of the atom. It's been pointed out by people who have participated in earlier conferences that Eisenhower had an intimate involvement with nuclear policy in a national security arena from the period of the Normandy invasion onwards. Either at high official levels or semi-official levels, he was deeply involved. But, not only that, this speech had tremendous overtones for the post-Colonial world. Eisenhower, as you know from the Suez period, had very strong-I don't know if this would be an appropriate way to put it-anti-Colonialist feelings. I think this was born largely out of two very impressionable tours in Panama in the 1920s and the Philippines in the 1930s. As a president, probably nobody had traveled and lived abroad as much as he did, including one stint in war-torn Europe after World War I and another stint, of course, after World War II. I think he understood the crucial nexus between national security and economic development for the post-Cold War world.

Furthermore, when he went to Columbia University, as president, he was exposed to a whole community of scientists whom he had obviously not known so well from his military service. These scientists made a very deep impression on him. In fact, there is a wonderful story about inviting Isidor Rabi to come up to the president's office and Eisenhower said to Rabi, "You know it is always a pleasure to meet such a distinguished employee of the university." To which Rabi said, "Mr. President, the faculty is the university." They developed an instant liking for each other at that moment and Rabi went on to play an important role actually in Atoms for Peace. Also, at Columbia University, Eisenhower had exposure to many industrialists who moved in New York circles and who also sat on the board at Columbia. All of these factors from his personal background did much to mold the construction of this speech and this initiative.

Today, even though we have deep-seated fears about rogue nations and individuals and the possibility that nuclear material might be used against the United States, or weapons of mass destruction, we do forget the potent anxiety and terror that existed in 1953. I think Eisenhower himself set out the statistics pretty well, but it was clear specifically, I think, that not only that Great Britain did test without any help from the United States, but I think obviously the developments in the Soviet Union were also critically important. Not only had they tested the atomic bomb, but they had also announced they had broken the United States' monopoly on the hydrogen bomb on August 19th just before President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace speech.

Nobody knew more than Eisenhower what kind of destruction had occurred in the Soviet Union during World War II. As you well know, the Soviet Union lost more people than all of the other nations in the world combined during World War II. The whole area between the western part of Europe to Moscow was completely flattened. Yet, it was very clear that the Soviets could be utterly competitive in the nuclear area, underscoring that a nation's wealth was not a prerequisite for gaining nuclear knowledge or capability. I think that is an extremely important point. As a matter of fact, what's clear-and he says it in his speech-is that the estimate in 1953 was that soon (and possibly) all the nations of the world would have the capability of developing nuclear weapons. So given the fearsome power of the hydrogen bomb, and as I say, the other points that the president made in his speech, it's very clear that this required high-level presidential management-sooner rather than later.

Of course, I'm sure you've been discussing in the other workshops the inherent contradictions of the atom, but the president had to try to put together a number of audiences and a number of ways of looking at this. He had some very specific things he wanted to accomplish through this speech. He asked himself: what could be done to break the stalemate primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union on disarmament talks? And, it's interesting that Eisenhower wanted desperately to re-engage the Soviets in a fresh new way on this issue. And it's interesting to me, being married to a scientist and a physicist, that he saw the scientific community as the bridge to that opportunity. I think that Rabi played a very important role in this, because scientists have an ability to speak a kind of common language and the president was of the firm belief that if there was even the tiniest of starts in this area, it could evolve into something broader that could eventually lead to meeting the United States' objective in the arms control area.

Furthermore, the president worried and wondered about how the tide of nuclear proliferation could be stemmed. How could we slow down the number of countries that were likely to go nuclear? Eisenhower saw this proposal as a way to involve the developing countries, as I mentioned, and also to try to harness increasing resentment in the developing world at a kind of double-standard that had been imposed by the developed nations. He, himself, must have wondered how long the developing world would sit still as long as the nuclear club seized but restricted access to the benefits that nuclear power could promise.

And finally, how could the president enhance public understanding of this nuclear question and garner their support? Eisenhower asked C.D. Jackson, who was a major figure in his day, to gather some advisers and come up with a draft of this speech. (You would not have wanted to draft a speech for Dwight Eisenhower. I think you could tell from the way he delivered it that he actually was a writer and not a talker, and I identify with that. But, he was Douglas MacArthur's speechwriter during the ‘20s and ‘30s, and he knew how to spin a draft himself). C.D. Jackson took his group off to the Metropolitan Club, they used to meet early in the morning so it became known as Operation Wheaties. Operation Wheaties met for a number of months. Eisenhower wanted to make the Atoms for Peace speech the principal foreign policy address of his administration, but Stalin died first, and this opened the opportunity and the necessity, frankly, for his speech called "A Chance for Peace."

In any case, Operation Wheaties continued and the group came up with their best thinking. In typical Eisenhower form, he read it and thought that it could be improved upon. He recalled to a friend that "every version left listeners with only a new sense of terror. So, I began to search around for new kind of ideas that could bring the world to look at the atomic problem in a broad and intelligent way and still escape the impasse to action created by Russian intransigence in the matter of mutual or neutral inspection of resources. "I wanted additionally," he wrote, "to give our people in the world some faint idea of the distance already traveled by this new science, but to do it in a way that would not create new alarm." He also wanted to give the public a "certain knowledge" that the taxpayers' hard earned dollars would not be spent for destructive purposes alone and that there could be economic and social benefits from this pioneering research. "The atom," Eisenhower would later say, was "nonpolitical, neither moral nor immoral, only man's choice could determine the purpose for which it would be best used."

So, on December 8th, the president flew up from Bermuda, where he had briefed the British and the French on the speech. As he neared New York, Eisenhower decided that the draft of the speech was still not good enough and he instructed his pilot to circle New York for half an hour while he put the finishing touches on this speech. He said that it gave him great amusement to see Lewis Strauss, who was the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, doing the mimeographing and stapling. In any case, as Air Force 1 touched down, the president as you saw him, arrived at the General Assembly-3,500 diplomats from 60 countries were in attendance. Lewis Strauss, who had actually done the mimeographing and the stapling, was sitting in the audience when that speech was given, and he described it this way. He said, "The speech was received, at first, with a very brief sound of indrawn breaths followed by a gigantic, collective sigh, and then wave after wave of applause." Strauss noted that even the Soviet delegation applauded enthusiastically.

Well, the president gave legitimacy to the international pursuit of atomic energy, but it also gave the United States standing in the developing world. This was a very critical point in the midst of the Cold War. As we all know, the heart of the proposal was the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to be stewards of this fund of excess fissionable material. Rabi was the man who was given the assignment by Eisenhower to try and find some way to give life to this new proposal, and according to Rabi's biographer, this suited him to the "T." Rabi said to the extent that ideas could be shared, ideas about nuclear reactors, about nuclear fission and fission products, about the effect of radiation on materials, about a whole range of topics, to the extent that informal judgments could take the place of paranoid uncertainty, then politics could be based on knowledge rather than assumptions. He and other world-class scientists were brought into the discussions about what to do next, and Rabi conceived the idea of an international conference on the peaceful uses of the atom.

Given the nature of the atom and the research underway, it might not surprise anybody in this audience that the scientific community was reluctant to produce papers for this effort, and so Rabi, having unique access to the president-as I'm very proud to say was true for many other scientists over the course of his administration-went to Eisenhower and complained that he deeply feared that this conference was going to be a total failure. The president's response to that was to pick up the phone and call John Foster Dulles and tell him to go up to the United Nations and to visit with Dag Hammarskjold on this issue and thus was born the series of international conferences under the auspices of the U.N.

The first conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, recalled Rabi, quote "made a very big difference. We and the Russians were forced to declassify a whole field of nuclear physics and technology in order to take a position at the conference. Declassifying the papers one by one would have taken forever; we simply opened up the field."

Nevertheless, at that particular first conference, 1,132 papers were actually presented in Geneva in August of 1955, with more than 3,600 scientists participating from 73 countries. The Russians were deeply impressed by the conference, too. Vladimir Vexler, a prominent physicist, called it "the first truly great international conference in the field of physics, a conference unique in history." He went on to say, "it is noted with satisfaction that scientists of the world easily found a common language." The conferences, as you will know, were again held in 1958, 1964, and 1971. Isidor Rabi, himself, regarded them as among his greatest career achievements. Furthermore, the process set in motion what Eisenhower had most desired, a way to engage the Soviet Union in the nuclear arena, a fresh new way, and in a way that would lead to cooperation, some of which helped with the early work on the nuclear test ban.

And so, in looking back, did Eisenhower know the historic forces he set into play? One can only imagine that he did. This was a man who by 1953 was already used to dealing with what I call "Big History." He was at the center of so much of that big history that he was used to thinking in big terms, in historical chapters and not pages. I think that there has been absolutely valid criticism about some of the trends that Atoms for Peace may have unleashed; it is true that nuclear materials and know-how, even if it's in the peaceful sector, have reached all parts of the world. But, could we imagine a world in which a proposal like this, a direction like this, might not have been taken? Quite frankly, the benefits that the atoms have brought to the world have been just too great when weighed against the risks, some risks, that we still today face.

Atoms for Peace, I would say, actually, rather effectively addressed the problem that concerned the president most, which was the prospect that soon, and possibly very soon, all of the world that desired nuclear weapons would have them. In fact, as we well know, there is a club, but the club of nuclear nations has been really rather limited when you acknowledge that nuclear technology is over 50 years old. I'm talking about nuclear-bomb technology. You could argue that it is extraordinary the club is as small as it is. Furthermore, no new nuclear weapon has been used since World War II and the nations of the world have essentially stopped testing. Nuclear electric power accounts for nearly one-fifth of the world's electricity, and nuclear power, it could be argued, has reduced global tensions by replacing oil in many applications and by providing much of the world's electricity that has been generated without the release of greenhouse gases or other destructive emissions. Many other nuclear and radiation-related technologies especially in radiopharmaceuticals and medical advances have saved millions and millions of lives from cancer treatments and other applications, and I need not go into the advances that have been made in agriculture and in other areas, especially in the developing world.

While Atoms for Peace, as well as the institutions it has created such as the IAEA and eventually the NPT, has come under fire recently, this is all constructive. The speech is 50 years old, and we are on a new threshold and new environment that opens the opportunity for reform and enhancement of those missions. We do live in different times, and it will be up to us to make something of this opportunity now.

Fifty years later, the nuclear dilemma is still with us. I personally was touched that Secretary Abraham and Minister of Atomic Energy, Alexander Rumyantsev were just at the U.N. last week. They were there, among other things, to commemorate the anniversary of this speech and to lay out their vision. Imagine how Dwight Eisenhower would feel today that 50 years later that the Secretary of Energy shared the podium with Russia's Minister of Atomic Energy. Indeed, Spencer Abraham called cooperation with Rumyantsev "exemplary" and the two went on to cite the many good things that have happened in the last 10 years to help secure nuclear materials, and to decrease the number of strategic nuclear warheads as envisioned in the Moscow Treaty. And a number of other measures have been taken.

Thought is being given to Atoms for Peace plus 50 years. I would add a few more points in closing. I don't think we've done enough with respect to increasing the decision time for a nuclear response. I think we also have to get a grip on tactical nuclear weapons, and therefore, it is with great pleasure that I will participate in the panel tomorrow. I also think that this conference has done much to talk about the potential of nuclear power, and again, we will talk about that tomorrow.

But just in closing, I would like to look back and think one more time about Dwight Eisenhower and what he had in mind. The speech was given 50 years ago, and I think, in looking at it, it really is a vision. But, it wasn't a blueprint. So, much remains for all of us to do. It is interesting that we did have these two major figures from the United States and Russia at the U.N. last week, but still, we are in desperate need for a new contemporary vision articulated at the highest levels of the United States government. I think that the effort to reconcile our national security relationship with the atom and the potential that the atom can bring in life-giving ways to ourselves and to developing countries around the world-these goals remain as valid as ever and so I would like to repeat what is the most important part of that speech. It is pure Eisenhower and I am very familiar with his writing. I know he wrote this himself when he said, "the United States pledges before you and before the world its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma, to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life." Thank you very much.