Baruch Plan

The Baruch Plan was a proposal by the United States government, written largely by Bernard Baruch but based on the Acheson–Lilienthal Report, to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) during its first meeting in June 1946. The United States, Great Britain and Canada called for an international organization to regulate atomic energy and President Truman responded by asking Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson and David E. Lilienthal to draw up a plan.

The plan proposed to:

The US agreed to turn over all of its weapons on the condition that all other countries pledge not to produce them and agree to an adequate system of inspection. The Soviets rejected this plan on the grounds that the United Nations was dominated by the United States and its allies in Western Europe, and could therefore not be trusted to exercise authority over atomic weaponry in an evenhanded manner. They proposed that America eliminate its nuclear weapons, before considering proposals for a system of controls and inspections.

Although the Soviets showed increased interest in the cause of arms control after they became a nuclear power in 1949, and particularly after the death of Stalin in 1953, the issue of the Soviet Union submitting to international inspection was always a thorny one upon which many attempts at nuclear arms control were stalled. Crucially, the Baruch Plan suggested that none of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council would be able to veto a decision to punish culprits. In presenting his plan to the United Nations, Baruch stated:

We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead. That is our business. Behind the black portent of the new atomic age lies a hope which, seized upon with faith, can work our salvation. If we fail, then we have damned every man to be the slave of fear. Let us not deceive ourselves; we must elect world peace or (elect) world destruction.

The Baruch Plan was not agreed to by the Soviet Union, and though debate on the matter continued until 1948, it was not seriously advanced later than the end of 1947. The USSR was, at the time of the negotiations, pursuing their own atomic bomb project, and the United States was continuing its own weapons development and production. With the failure of the plan, both nations embarked on programs of weapons development, innovation, production, and testing as part of the overall nuclear arms race of the Cold War.

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