A Fresh Look

Reading in shifts from a bulky, 105 page statement, the five Atomic Energy Commission members last week urged Congress to bring the eight-year-old McMahon Act into line with President Eisenhower's atomic-energy recommendations of last February by permitting greater private-industry participation at home and sharing some atomic military information with allies abroad.

"Continuance of complete Government dominance . . ." said the commissioners, "could produce a change in our society as significant in its way as any that might accrue from the technical novelty of nuclear power." In a look at the future, AEC foresaw a few "fullscale, privately owned" plants producing electricity from nuclear fuel before 1965; by 1975, atomic power may be producing up to 10% of the nation's total electrical-energy needs.

But once the commissioners finished their statement, they disagreed sharply on current handling of the atomic program. The three Truman Administration holdovers (Henry DeWolf Smyth, Thomas E. Murray and Eugene M. Zuckert) warned against a trend toward centralization of authority in Chairman Lewis Strauss. Physicist Smyth declared that on some matters Strauss had closed his fellow commissioners out. Industrialist Murray urged equal "authority, responsibility and access to information" for all five members of the commission.

Chairman Strauss asked that Congress define the respective duties of commissioners and chairman. For policy determination, Strauss urged that the U.S. keep the Government-by-commission approach. But, said Strauss, in daily operations of either a large business or a Government agency (AEC is both), commission rule is "not possible."

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