POWER June 2012 - 80

NUCLEAR POWER
of eastern Washington, and elsewhere. Among
the scientists who lived and worked in the endeavor,
free scientific debate was the order of
the day. But often, they couldn't even discuss
what they were working on with their families.
The code of secrecy grated on many.
While the Manhattan Project scientists were
few in number, they possessed considerable
political power and were justly admired by the
general public; they owned " the knowledge, "
the expertise on how to make the bombs. The
nation could ill-afford to lose the efforts of the
atomic scientists-among the finest physicists,
chemists, mathematicians, metallurgists,
and technicians ever assembled.
The result of this brew of conflicting interests,
desires, and political imperatives was the Atomic
Energy Act of 1946. A fundamentally compromised
and flawed piece of legislation, the 1946
law created an unaccountable administrative
structure that would dominate the U.S. atomic
energy program for thirty years. Its legacy is
felt today. Produced by a special congressional
committee assembled to paper over the schisms
that divided Congress and the Truman administration,
the act created a carefully balanced
structure unique in the government. It possessed
enormous responsibility and power with little
external oversight and disregard for the Constitutional
imperative of separation of powers.
For the first eight years, the AEC functioned
essentially as a faux military agency. Congress
mandated continued government ownership of
nuclear materials, technology, and know-how.
There was no civilian nuclear power industry
in the United States in the first decade following
the victory in World War II. Twenty years
later, there were still only a handful of nuclear
power plants in the United States. But billions
had been spent on military and civilian
schemes-many of them harebrained.
In turning the military program into nominally
civilian hands, Congress created myriad
institutional and bureaucratic problems. It built
a structure that proved perfect for intrigue,
politics, pork barrel spending, and low-level
(and sometimes higher) bureaucratic warfare
among competing power centers. The Atomic
Energy Commission; the White House and its
Bureau of the Budget; the Pentagon; industry
lobbyists; and the Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy all participated in a bureaucratic cotillion
of program authorizations, funding,
schedules, and allocations of resources. It provided
an unfortunate model for congressional
behavior continuing to the present.
While the 1946 law established the AEC
to manage the weapons program, the military
remained intimately involved. Military decisions
drove the shape of the AEC program,
in terms of the kinds of bombs, the numbers
of warheads, and even major decisions on nuclear
technology. Adm. Hyman Rickover, for
80
example, the father of the nuclear submarine,
kept both his military rank and a position as civilian
head of an office at the AEC. The same
dual military-civilian arrangement was established
in the AEC-Air Force nuclear bomber
program and other ventures.
A five-member commission, appointed by
the president, governed the AEC. The chairman
came to be considered the face of atomic
energy in the United States. The AEC's general
manager, typically out of the limelight, ran the
day-to-day activities of the agency. Depending
on the strengths and wishes of the chairman,
AEC general managers sometimes were
important powers unto themselves under the
light-handed and often heedless direction of the
chairman and commission, sometimes partners
linking the AEC staff and its policy and political
overseers, sometimes simply spear-carriers for
the commission and Congress.
Offering independent scientific advice to the
commission, a nine-member General Advisory
Committee (GAC) consisted of presidentially
appointed civilians and important scientists
charged with giving the commissioners- who
often had little or no scientific background-the
best technical advice available. The 1946 law
gave the GAC the task to " advise the Commission
on scientific and technical matters relating
to materials, production, and research and development,
to be composed of nine members,
who shall be appointed from civilian life by the
President. " As a practical matter, the AEC staff
typically gave the White House the names of
nominees to the GAC, effectively choosing who
would oversee their operations. The GAC often
turned out to be a critic and sometimes a scold
and goad to AEC projects, particularly when
Oppenheimer was its chairman.
A Military Liaison Committee (MLC)-created
by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, the respected
Michigan Republican, during the congressional
debate over the 1946 act-balanced the civilian
views of the GAC. While dedicated to civilian
control of nuclear energy, Vandenberg understood
that the commission would continue to
have close ties to the military, including developing,
testing, and producing the nuclear weapons
stockpile for the nation as well as research and
development for a new generation of weapons.
He believed the military, specifically the Army
Chief of Staff, should continue to have input at
the commission on military issues. Groves, who
ran the Manhattan Project with intense personal
interest and care, and who opposed turning the
endeavor into a civilian satrapy, lobbied for a
continued major military role.
Congress conceded that the MLC should
provide military advice to the commission. The
secretaries of War and the Navy, and later the
Air Force, had the responsibility to name the
military committee members. The first MLC
was made up entirely of men chosen by Groves,
www.powermag.com
positioning himself as first head of the committee.
Groves never really accepted the idea
that civilians should run his military offspring,
which had done so well under his parentage.
Congress also kept military personnel in
place in the civilian bureaucracy through the
creation of an AEC staff office, the Director
of Military Applications. Congress earmarked
this slot for a military officer, and the office
would effectively run the commission's dayto-day
military activities, reporting to the
commission through the general manager.
David Lilienthal proved the dominant figure
of the early days of the AEC. Named, by
Truman, the first chairman of the new, civilian
agency, his confirmation hearing before the
nine Senate members of the Joint Committee
on Atomic Energy-created specifically
to consider the 1946 Atomic Energy Act-
turned into a classic partisan and ideological
brawl that presaged some of the Red Scare
years of the 1950s. It was not a good omen for
the AEC's future as an independent agency.
Republicans saw Lilienthal's nomination
as an opportunity to score hits on the Democrats
and the Truman administration. Some of
the GOP members of the Senate were carrying
jurisdictional water for Groves, who remained
a foe of the new AEC. Others wanted to use
Lilienthal's nomination as an opportunity to
blast the creation and performance of the Tennessee
Valley Authority, one of the New Deal's
signature accomplishments, which Lilienthal
headed. Republican orthodoxy regarded TVA
as at least the perfidious camel's socialist nose
under the tent of private-sector electric utilities.
Sen. Styles Bridges, a New Hampshire Republican,
criticized Lilienthal for leading the TVA,
" a social experiment, which is a wide departure
from the American system of private ownership
of property. " Ohio Republican Bob Taft,
whom the press branded " Mr. Republican, " and
who was a potential Republican presidential
candidate in 1948, opposed Lilienthal as " temperamentally
unfitted to head any important
executive agency in a democratic government
and too 'soft' on issues connected with communism
and Soviet Russia. "
The fiercest opposition to Lilienthal came
from a fellow Democrat, albeit a conservative
one, Sen. Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee.
Having joined the Senate in 1917 and
serving as the Senate president pro tempore
until the GOP electoral success of 1946,
McKellar loathed Lilienthal, largely because
Lilienthal-as TVA board member since 1935
and chairman starting in 1941-had resisted
McKellar's efforts to turn the TVA into a patronage
honeypot. One history of the period
describes McKellar as possessing " a mind
warped by age and a smoldering hatred. "
In Lilienthal's AEC confirmation hearings,
McKellar resurrected bogus charges, rejected
POWER | June 2012
http://www.powermag.com

POWER June 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER June 2012

Contents
POWER June 2012 - Cover1
POWER June 2012 - Cover2
POWER June 2012 - Contents
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