History of U.S. Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy, 1969-1977, Detailed in
New Declassified Documents Collection

Henry J. Gomberg, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan, provided information to the State Department and other agencies that helped them connect the dots about the purposes of Israel’s secret Dimona nuclear reactor.[1] With the support of the International Cooperation Administration (a forerunner of USAID), he had been in Israel to work at the Technion on a training program to familiarize students of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Before Gomberg left Israel, he briefed U.S. Ambassador Ogden Reid and Embassy staffers on his concerns about the Israeli atomic project. He had developed suspicions when he discovered that the Israelis were working on projects that they would not discuss with him. Gomberg learned that Israeli scientists were seeking to produce gram amounts of plutonium, which was “significant” because “amounts of this size could conceivably find use in weapons.” Responding to a question from Reid, Gomberg “thought it was conceivable that Israel could have weapon capability in this field in less than 10 years.” As it turned out, seven years later the Israelis had a workable bomb.

Since the early 1960s, the U.S. government had closely monitored Western European efforts to develop gas centrifuge technology for producing highly enriched uranium as reactor fuel. Because of the gas centrifuge’s relevance to weapons proliferation, Washington had persuaded the Dutch, West Germans, and the British to apply secrecy controls to the technology to prevent its further dissemination. By the close of the decade, the three countries were working to combine their resources to use the gas centrifuge for producing enriched uranium on an industrial scale. The U.S. government was moderately supportive of the tripartite project, seeing it as compatible with the NPT and as a worthy example of West European cooperation, although it would produce a new competitor in world enriched uranium markets.

One complication that the AEC shared with the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was that the British plan to share their centrifuge model with the Dutch and the West Germans would involve the transfer of technology derived from secret U.S. “restricted data.” Yet after meeting with the British and inspecting their centrifuge model, AEC experts decided that it was in the U.S. interest not to interfere. In part, this was because the British model was “unadvanced” compared to U.S. gas centrifuge designs: “it does not appear to be desirable to force them to a more advanced model earlier than their present schedules would seem to call for.” According to the AEC, “From the standpoint of proliferation and potential competition with the U.S. in the foreign uranium market, there is some advantage to leaving things as they are.” The Tripartite project would eventually build a centrifuge plant in the Netherlands that hired Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan who stole design information for Pakistani’s nuclear weapons program.

The NPT included requirements for the International Atomic Energy Agency to establish and implement verification arrangements to ensure that countries receiving nuclear technology did not divert those resources into the production of fissile material for weapons. According to the CIA, the “verification program required by the NPT is the first significant attempt to enforce an arms control agreement by on-site inspection.”

Once the Treaty entered into force in 1970, IEAE members began negotiations on inspection requirements, including their “frequency and intensity.” The negotiations were prolonged, but the U.S. attained its “basic objective when it secured for the IAEA the right to perform inspections on 24-hour notice and on a continuous basis wherever necessary to ensure knowledge of how fissionable material was being used.” Some key countries, including Japan and West Germany, favored a “longer notification period,” but the other negotiators appeased them with “explicit” statements that the IAEA “would have no role in the design of nuclear installations and that inspectors were to “make every effort to minimize any practical difficulties for facility operators and the state.”[2]

National Archives, Record Group 84, Records of U.S. Mission to the IAEA

As it turned out, IAEA officials would be an important source for unofficial intelligence on proliferation issues. From the late 1960s to the late 1980s, Taiwan was a constant concern because of its persistent interest in developing capacities to produce fissile material as the basis for a nuclear weapons program.[3] With its expulsion from the UN and the IAEA, Taiwan leader’s began to feel more isolated in the early 1970s and initiated efforts to obtain basic technology toward a nuclear deterrent. The U.S. Mission to the IAEA learned from the Agency’s inspector general, Rudolph Rometsch, whom it considered an “honest and accurate” source, that Taiwan “was attempting to purchase a pilot separation plant from French sources which would enable ROC [to] commence development [of] its own chemical reprocessing facilities for nuclear material.”

Rometsch “surmised” that the ROC was attempting to “start developing independent nuclear capability which would be outside of international control and inspection.” The Taiwanese were negotiating with the French firm Saint Gobin (which had supplied Israel’s nuclear reprocessing plant), but France’s representative to the IAEA Governing Board, Bertrand Goldschmidt, “assured Rometsch that he would advise that firm to break off talks with Taiwanese officials.” That would be far from the end of the story, and Taiwan’s nuclear aspirations would confound U.S. policymakers until the late 1980s.

India’s “peaceful nuclear explosion” was a great surprise to the U.S. government, which had no idea that a test was in the works. The surprise factor led the U.S. intelligence community to prepare a “post-mortem” on why it missed the test and what it needed to do to prevent a future intelligence failure. The test also proved to be a watershed development in U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy, for example, by leading to greater focus on ensuring the ratification of the NPT by key allies and preventing the export of sensitive technology that was applicable to the production of fissile material.

If anything, the test was an even greater shock to Canada, whose CANDU nuclear reactor enabled Indian scientists to acquire the spent fuel needed for plutonium production. According to this report from the U.S. Embassy, “Canadian technical people who have been closely associated with the Indian program are generally frustrated and chagrined at the Indian test.” Also worrying them was the possibility that the CANDU reactor, which Canada had provided to India in the late 1950s, would become “known as a “do-it-yourself bomb kit.”

The Embassy conveyed a “guestimate” made by Canadian nuclear officials that India could have on hand between 50 to 100 kilograms of plutonium or even more. Despite the denial of senior Canadian official Lorne Gray, some of the plutonium came from fuel bundles irradiated in the CANDU reactor at Rajasthan.

To discuss the policy implications of the Indian test, Kissinger had a lengthy meeting with senior staff and advisers. including U.S. Ambassador to India Daniel P. Moynihan. A key issue was whether proliferation was inevitable. Policy Planning Director Winston Lord argued that it was not and that the U.S. could do something about it. If nothing was done, “you have the greater threat of blackmail. I just think a proliferated world is a more dangerous world.” Kissinger accepted those points but was “willing to postulate the opposite of what you have said—that it is probably inevitable.” Nevertheless, he was willing to agree that “we should nevertheless try to slow it down.”

The discussion was not conclusive because Kissinger wanted his advisers to rework a policy paper that they had prepared for the meeting. The discussion included the problem of Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNEs), how to keep “PNE countries from going military,” the need to discourage India from further testing, the “worrisome aspects” of civilian trade in nuclear technology, and the possibility of working with other nuclear suppliers to prevent the export of sensitive technology. That France was the only major supplier that had not signed the NPT was a problem that Kissinger and his advisers would have to address. They agreed that a “finished strategy” required talks about cooperative action with the Soviet Union, which was also a supplier.

MDR release by CIA, currently under appeal at Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel

After being alerted by Seoul-based CIA operations officer Richard P. Lawless and the U.S. Embassy, the intelligence community reached agreement, expressed in this memorandum, that South Korea was conducting a secret program to produce nuclear weapons.[4] The CIA withheld from publication in the Foreign Relations series the “key judgements” of this report, and it took an MDR appeal before the Agency released substantive content. The “key judgements” covered prospects for using research reactors as plutonium sources, the outlook for producing nuclear weapons, and possible delivery systems, such F4D fighters and Nike-Hercules missiles.

The assessment was that a South Korean bomb was not imminent because it would take at least ten years for Seoul to produce a nuclear weapon “even if its program proceeded reasonably smoothly.” In addition, developing an indigenous missile system for weapons delivery would also take ten years. South Korea could produce the plutonium needed for fissile material using the CANDU-type reactor that Seoul had contracted from Canada. Diversion of spent fuel from the safeguarded CANDU reactor was possible, but the South Koreans could produce a safeguards-free reactor on their own by following the Indian example of building a copy. “A nuclear weapons program based on a domestically-produced safeguard free CANDU-type reactor would not put an inordinate strain on Korean financial resources.” A major element of plutonium production was reprocessing technology, but excised from this report are any references to the South Korean effort to acquire reprocessing technology from the French firm St. Gobin.

During the months that followed, the Ford administration made an increasingly determined effort to stop the program dead in its tracks and prevent Seoul from acquiring an enrichment plant that could produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. Washington could not do that singlehandedly, and it would take Canadian and French cooperation to do so.

After the Indian nuclear test, it became a U.S. priority to ensure that key countries, such as Italy, Japan, and West Germany, ratified the NPT so that they were in full compliance with the Treaty.[5] Earlier in the Nixon administration, Nixon and Kissinger had given low priority to Japanese ratification because they wanted to leave Beijing in doubt about Tokyo’s intentions. Priorities changed after the Indian test, and in February 1975, Secretary of State Kissinger approved a recommendation that the time was right to encourage the Japanese to ratify; otherwise, the ruling Liberal Democrats would conclude that the U.S. was not interested.

Supporting that advice was a telegram from the U.S. Embassy reporting on a conversation with the Foreign Ministry’s Disarmament Chief, Takanori Kazuhara, who discussed anti-NPT sentiment in the Liberal Democratic Party and the need for the U.S. to provide an “expression of interest” at a high level. Even though Prime Minister Miki and Foreign Minister Miyazawa supported ratification, Miki had a weak position in the LDP where opponents were arguing that the U.S. had “shown no recent concern whether Japan ratified or not” and that the U.S. was actually “proliferating, for example, by suppling Israel [with] nuclear technology.” To counter that thinking, Kazuhara noted that “many countries, especially Europeans, Australia, Canada, US, etc. were very interested in Japan’s proceeding with ratification” and that, at the “right moment international expression of interest as opposed to pressure would be significant contribution to GOJ campaign within LDP to proceed.”

In 1972, after a disastrous war with India, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulkifar Ali Bhutto directed Pakistani scientists to acquire a nuclear weapons capability and he increased the pressure after India’s May 1974 nuclear explosion.[6] Like India and Israel, Pakistan was an NPT holdout, refusing to sign the treaty. During 1974, U.S. intelligence picked up information about the Pakistani nuclear project, and official concern increased when the Pakistanis began talks with the French about acquiring a reprocessing plant and the West Germans about a heavy water plant. While not ready to recommend objections to either transaction, Kissinger’s advisers believed that the U.S. should put all three governments on notice that it had “reservations” about the proposed deals. According to Sonnenfeldt, “I believe it is inevitable that we must make representations to all three governments expressing our misgivings about these deals, otherwise you will be pilloried in Congress and the press for standing by while Pakistan acquires the wherewithal to build nuclear weapons.”

The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) prepared a report on the Pakistani nuclear weapons effort. While only part of it is summarized on page 1 of Atherton’s memorandum, the “key judgement” comes across: the “‘unambiguous’ evidence that, following India’s 1974 nuclear explosion, Prime Minister Bhutto initiated a program intended to lead to development of a nuclear explosive capability.” While the proposed reprocessing plant was concerning, so was a proposed heavy water plant from West Germany. Even though it would come with IAEA safeguards, Atherton was concerned because a heavy water plant would “provide an additional, vital element in any future Pakistani weapons program.” It was not until 1977 that the French agreed with the U.S. to break the reprocessing plant contract, but there was no stopping Pakistan from heading toward a nuclear weapons capability.

This message from U.S. Ambassador Richard Sneider sheds light on the endgame of South Korea’s attempt to acquire a reprocessing plant from France for its weapons program. While the U.S. had plans to send a team to discuss peaceful uses of nuclear energy with South Korean scientists, Sneider explained to Deputy Prime Minister Nam Duck Woo that the talks would not occur unless Seoul decided to forego the reprocessing plant. A key point of pressure was Canada’s opposition to providing a CANDU reactor if Seoul went ahead with the reprocessing facility. Nam argued that “there would be [a] very severe reaction in Blue House”—President Park’s residence— “and full responsibility would be placed on U.S. shoulders for pressuring Canadians not to sign.” Sneider responded that the Canadians had their own reasons and were not under pressure. “I stressed that simplest and most direct way to deal with problem [was] to cancel French contract” because “this would open way for U.S. cooperation” and prevent any problems with Ottawa.

With the explosion of oil prices and increased accumulation of revenues, the Shah of Iran sought to develop a nuclear energy sector as a domestic power alternative to oil and gas. The Shah’s objective raised proliferation concerns in part because he proposed developing a domestic capacity to reprocess spent fuel that could be used as reactor fuel. That raised the risk of plutonium production that could be used for bombs.

The U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations coincided with ongoing discussions in the Ford White House on the need to develop credible international alternatives to domestic reprocessing to manage proliferation risk. During talks with the Shah, the U.S. proposed buying back the spent fuel rods and reprocessing them in the United States as a less expensive alternative to reprocessing in Iran. At that point, uranium enrichment options and technology were not part of the talks with Iran.

When Kissinger met with the Shah in early August 1976, he spelled out the options, including the buy-back option. Kissinger made it clear that “reprocessing in Iran on a purely national basis would not be an acceptable solution.” That seemed acceptable to the Shah and his advisers, but they worried about the reliability of the United States as a supplier of reactor fuel, among other concerns. The talks were friendly, but the Iran nuclear deal would remain unsettled until 1978, not long before the fall of the Shah.