Secrets

The meeting was secret--but meetings of conspicuous people in conspicuous places are not easily kept secret in Washington.

Harry Truman had invited to Blair House 14 high military, diplomatic and congressional figures, including Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Chairman David Lilienthal of the Atomic Energy Commission and Vice President Alben Barkley. Secret Service men shooed people away from the sidewalk out front, and forbade photographers to use their cameras. When the visitors finally left, after 2 1/2 hours with the President, they were grim-faced, and their jaws were clamped shut by order of the President. Senator Millard Tydings told reporters: "You wouldn't print the story if you had it, for the good of the country."

Newsmen finally did, however, dig out something of what went on--and printed it. The fact seemed to be that Britain, which had been in at the start but not at the finish of atom-bomb making, had at last just about solved the knack of making them. That fact, if it were a fact, had enormous consequences. For one thing, if the U.S. no longer had an atomic monopoly, it would no longer have sole say in what to do about the atom.

There were several immediate questions to face: one was a British request for a greater exchange of classified atomic information with Great Britain and Canada. Another was that the British soon might demand a larger share of the crucial Belgian Congo uranium production, which is now shipped mostly to the U.S. The U.S. would probably have to reach some sort of atomic accord with Britain.

Just how serious the issue had become, or what was being done about it, Harry Truman would not say. To one probing reporter he quipped: "You just want to find out something and you ain't going to do it."

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