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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/GOVERNMENT/USA/Atomic Energy Commission.md
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---
created: 2025-03-05
updated: 2026-10-05
title: Atomic Energy Commission
aliases:
- Atomic Energy Commission
- AEC
- United States Atomic Energy Commission
- USAEC
- US Atomic Energy Commission
- Israeli Atomic Energy Commission
- Israel Atomic Energy Commission
tags:
- Organization
- Government
- Nuclear
- AtomsForPeace
- NUMEC
- Dimona
- Israel
category: "U.S. Government"
summary: "An Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) is a governmental body responsible for the oversight and regulation of nuclear energy and related activities within a country."
start: 1947
end: 1974
summary: "The civilian agency created in 1946 that held United States nuclear weapons materials until its abolition in 1975, and the name of Israel's parallel commission; it figures in NUMEC, Dimona and Groom Lake."
start: 1946
end: 1975
location: "Washington, D.C."
relations:
- type: head_of
with: "[[John McCone]]"
reverse: true
role: "chairman, July 14, 1958 to January 20, 1961"
start: 1958-07-14
end: 1961-01-20
fn: 6
- type: head_of
with: "[[James R. Schlesinger]]"
reverse: true
role: "chairman from 1971"
start: 1971
end: 1973
fn: 7
- type: head_of
with: "[[Lewis L. Strauss]]"
reverse: true
role: "chairman in 1955, when the commission added the Groom Lake area to the Nevada Proving Ground"
start: 1955
fn: 12
- type: employed_by
with: "[[Zalman Mordecai Shapiro]]"
reverse: true
role: "chemist, before he headed the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation"
fn: 10
- type: investigated
with: "[[Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation]]"
role: "inventory loss of 202 pounds of highly enriched uranium at Apollo, Pennsylvania, discovered in late 1965"
start: 1965
end: 1966
fn: 9
---
An Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) is a governmental body responsible for the oversight and regulation of nuclear energy and related activities within a country. These commissions typically manage nuclear research, development, and the production of nuclear materials, often with both civilian and military applications.
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was established by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, approved August 1, 1946, as a body of five members appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, one of whom the President designated Chairman.[^1] The act defined "restricted data" as "all data concerning the manufacture or utilization of atomic weapons, the production of fissionable material, or the use of fissionable material in the production of power" (unless the Commission determined it could be published), made communication of such data with intent to injure the United States or to secure an advantage to a foreign nation punishable by death or life imprisonment on a jury's recommendation, barred any individual from access until the Federal Bureau of Investigation had made an investigation and report, and created a [[Joint Committee on Atomic Energy]] of both houses of Congress to which the Commission was to keep itself fully informed.[^1] The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, signed October 11, 1974, provided in section 101 that "the Atomic Energy Commission is hereby abolished" and transferred its functions to a new [[Energy Research and Development Administration]] and a [[Nuclear Regulatory Commission]]; both began operations on January 19, 1975.[^2][^3]
### Israeli Atomic Energy Commission
### The Israeli Atomic Energy Commission
The Israeli Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1952. It was chaired by [[Ernst David Bergmann]] and operated under the direct jurisdiction of [[Shimon Peres]] and the Ministry of Defense. While publicly presented as being for peaceful nuclear research, its primary objective was the development of [[Israel]]'s nuclear weapons program.[^1]
The name was also borne by an Israeli body. [[Seymour Hersh]] wrote in *The Samson Option* that the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1952, chaired by the organic chemist [[Ernst David Bergmann]], and operated under the direct jurisdiction of [[Shimon Peres]] and the Ministry of Defense; Hersh describes it as publicly presented as a body for peaceful nuclear research whose primary objective was the development of [[Israel]]'s nuclear weapons program.[^4]
### United States Atomic Energy Commission
### Atoms for Peace and Nahal Soreq
The United States Atomic Energy Commission (USAEC) was an independent federal agency established after World War II, responsible for the custody of America's nuclear materials, operating nuclear reactors, and developing atomic bombs. Under the [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] administration's Atoms for Peace program, the USAEC facilitated cooperation in the civilian uses of atomic energy, including financing and fueling a small nuclear research reactor at Nahal Soreq in [[Israel]]. This agreement included inspection rights for the [[United States]] to ensure nuclear materials were not diverted to weapons research.[^1]
Hersh also wrote that under the [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] administration's [[Atoms for Peace]] program the United States commission helped finance and fuel a small research reactor at Nahal Soreq in Israel, under an agreement that included inspection rights for the United States to ensure nuclear materials were not diverted to weapons research, and that [[Lewis L. Strauss]], chairman of the commission, and his successor John McCone were both briefed on the Israeli nuclear program, though their responses and actions varied.[^4] Eisenhower Library records place McCone's chairmanship from July 14, 1958 to January 20, 1961, during which, according to the finding aid to his papers, he "adopted a policy of providing intelligence briefings on Soviet nuclear capabilities" to the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, and President [[John F. Kennedy]] named him Director of Central Intelligence in 1961.[^5][^6] James R. Schlesinger, whose Central Intelligence Agency biography lists a post as a member of the commission from 1971, became [[Director of Central Intelligence]] in February 1973.[^7]
[[Lewis L. Strauss]] served as chairman of the USAEC, followed by [[John McCone]]. Both were briefed on the Israeli nuclear program, though their responses and actions varied.[^1]
### The first American visit to Dimona
According to the National Security Archive's collection on the first American visit to [[Dimona]], President Kennedy treated the reactor as one of his top issues after taking office on January 20, 1961. The commission selected two of its scientists, [[Ulysses Staebler]], assistant director of its Reactor Development Division, and [[Jesse Croach]], a heavy water expert employed by [[DuPont]] at the commission's [[Savannah River]] facility. They arrived in Israel on May 17, 1961 and on Saturday May 20 visited Dimona, escorted by Professor [[Ephraim Katzir]] and the Dimona director [[Manes Pratt]], who briefed them on the 1957 decision to expand the nuclear program through the Dimona project. On May 26 the State Department sent National Security Adviser [[McGeorge Bundy]] a two-page memorandum on the visit in which, in the Archive's summary, the scientists "concluded that the reactor 'is of the scope and peaceful character previously described to the United States.'" The Archive's account states that the positive report was "critical for making the meeting between President Kennedy and Prime Minister [[David Ben-Gurion|Ben Gurion]] on 30 May successful" and that "the confrontation over Dimona was delayed for another two years."[^8]
### NUMEC
[[Washington Star|The Washington Star]] reported on March 23, 1978 that the former commission, "confused and embarrassed by the worst loss of nuclear materials in its history," had decided in 1966 to conceal the problem from the public on the ground that premature disclosure "could lead to sensational and probably inaccurate press reports," according to a previously classified document released by the [[Senate Governmental Affairs Committee]]. The source of the embarrassment was the unexplained loss of 202 pounds of highly enriched uranium from a plant at Apollo, Pennsylvania, discovered in late 1965; the Star's account of the document says that [[Howard C. Brown]] told a secret briefing attended by the commissioners and top staff that because the commission's safeguards system rested on a "presumption of honesty" it "might not reveal a deliberate and systematic attempt" to divert material to a foreign government, and that the commission's officials resolved their dilemma by developing a system for estimating the loss, with the occurrence date fixed at March 25, 1966.[^9] A Star article of 1978 on a [[General Accounting Office]] report, which gives the missing quantity as 208 pounds, said the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] and the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] had blocked its release; that the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), which operated the plant, was headed by a former commission chemist, [[Zalman Mordecai Shapiro]], who had business dealings with the Israeli atomic energy establishment and insisted the uranium was lost in processing; that according to documents obtained by investigators the commission and the [[U.S. Navy|Navy]] had repeatedly reprimanded Shapiro for lax security that allowed foreign visitors, including French and Israeli scientists, too much access to a plant that housed bomb-grade uranium and plutonium and "a library of classified nuclear weapons data"; and that the commission's main investigator of NUMEC, identified as Howard Brown, said the government was never able to find sufficient evidence that Shapiro was involved in illegal activity.[^10]
The same file of CIA press clippings contains the Washington Star and Washington Post reports of March 2, 1978 that [[Carl E. Duckett]] had told Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials in a closed February 1976 briefing that the CIA considered the question of whether highly enriched uranium had been diverted from the NUMEC plant "academic" because Israel had developed its own weapons, and that Duckett said that if any scheme to let material go to Israel had been under consideration "he would have known about it and he never heard so much as a rumor"; the Post added that the NRC on the preceding Saturday had released a censored 550-page report responding to a House committee inquiry, which said that NRC Executive Director [[Lee V. Gossick]] "testified incorrectly" when he told the House Commerce Committee the NRC had no evidence a significant amount of nuclear material had been stolen from NUMEC.[^11]
### Groom Lake
In April 1955 [[Richard Bissell]] and Colonel [[Osmund Ritland]] of the [[Air Force]], with [[Lockheed]]'s [[Kelly Johnson]] and test pilot [[Tony LeVier]], spotted an airstrip at Groom Lake "near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's Nevada Proving Ground." The CIA's official history of the U-2 program records that Bissell discovered the strip lay outside the proving ground and that the Agency asked the commission to add the Groom Lake area to its holdings; the partly legible passage refers to "AEC Chairman Adm.," and Lewis Strauss was McCone's predecessor as chairman.[^12] The strip became the site later known as [[Area 51]].
### The Los Alamos conference on green fireballs
The minutes of a conference on "aerial phenomena" held at 1300 on February 16, 1949 in room P-162 of the [[Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory]], classified Secret and later declassified on December 9, 1975, list among those present, from the [[Fourth Army]], the [[Armed Forces Special Weapons Project]], the [[University of New Mexico]] (Dr. [[Lincoln LaPaz]]), the FBI (Mr. Maxwell), the University of California ([[Norris Bradbury]], Dr. Holloway, Mr. Hoyt, Dr. Manley, [[Frederick Reines]] and [[Edward Teller]]) and "USAEC, SFOO: Mr. Morgan." Dr. LaPaz described the December 12, 1948 Starvation Peak fireball as of constant intensity and horizontal path, about two seconds in duration and of a green hue not observed in meteor falls, and said of the observed paths: "I defy you to find anywhere among meteorists, examples of conventional meteorites that move over long horizontal paths." Captain Neef of the Fourth Army stated that the Air Force's Project Sign "is now project Grudge, which includes the phenomena in New Mexico," and Teller said that from what LaPaz said, "it certainly sounds like everything else but meteors."[^13]
### Seats on the intelligence advisory bodies
The Central Intelligence Agency's history of the Directors of Central Intelligence records that the commission was represented on the Intelligence Advisory Committee chaired by the Director, alongside the FBI and the military and State Department intelligence chiefs, and on its successor the United States Intelligence Board, on which Donald R. Cotter represented the commission in 1972 when the Board met under Director [[Richard Helms]].[^14]
### The commission's grants in the psi files
The CIA's STARGATE collection includes the 1972 paper by [[Stuart J. Freedman]] and [[John F. Clauser]], "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," whose acknowledgements state that the work was "supported by U.S. Atomic Energy Commission," and the 1979 [[Stanford Research Institute|SRI]] biography of [[Edwin C. May]], who joined the Grill Flame remote perturbation work, lists among his publications the 1969 "Proposal to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for Procurement of a Computer Implemented Nuclear Data Acquisition and Control System," [[Crocker Nuclear Laboratory]] Report UCD-112.[^15]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 2, 7.
[^1]: Atomic Energy Act of 1946, Public Law 585, 60 Stat. 755, approved August 1, 1946, sections 2(a), 10(b) and 15, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-60/pdf/STATUTE-60-Pg755.pdf.
[^2]: Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, Public Law 93-438, 88 Stat. 1233, October 11, 1974, section 101, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-88/pdf/STATUTE-88-Pg1233.pdf.
[^3]: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, *A Short History of Nuclear Regulation* (NUREG/BR-0533), introduction, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0533/ (archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/2022/https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/brochures/br0533/).
[^4]: Seymour M. Hersh, *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy* (Random House, 1991), chapters 2 and 7.
[^5]: "McCone, John A.: Papers, 1958-1961," Dwight D. Eisenhower Library finding aid, Accession A79-9, https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/finding-aids/pdf/mccone-john-papers.pdf.
[^6]: Same finding aid.
[^7]: "Biography, James R. Schlesinger," Central Intelligence Agency, CIA-RDP75B00380R000400150017-8, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp75b00380r000400150017-8.
[^8]: "The First American Visit to Dimona," in Avner Cohen, *Israel and the Bomb* documents, National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/israel/documents/first/index.html.
[^9]: John J. Fialka, "Why the AEC Failed to Tell of Lost Nuclear Materials," *The Washington Star*, March 23, 1978, CIA-RDP88-01315R000400060009-6, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000400060009-6.
[^10]: John J. Fialka, "Missing-Uranium Report Withheld," *The Washington Star* (1978), CIA-RDP88-01315R000400060006-9, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000400060006-9.
[^11]: John Fialka, "Helms Says He Can't Recall LBJ Talk on Israeli A-Bomb," *The Washington Star*, March 2, 1978, CIA-RDP88-01315R000400060012-2, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000400060012-2; "Ex-CIA Aide Says Johnson Quashed Israel A-Bomb Data," *The Washington Post*, March 2, 1978, CIA-RDP88-01315R000400060010-4, https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp88-01315r000400060010-4. Duckett is the sole source for the CIA's view of the diversion question.
[^12]: Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach, *The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART Programs, 1954-1974* (CIA History Staff, 1992), chapter 2, "Developing the U-2," pp. 56 to 57, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%202.pdf.
[^13]: Minutes, "Conference on Aerial Phenomena," Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, February 16, 1949, transcribed at https://ufologie.patrickgross.org/bb/caop16feb1949-01.htm (pages 01, 02, 03, 05 and 18).
[^14]: Douglas F. Garthoff, *Directors of Central Intelligence as Leaders of the U.S. Intelligence Community, 1946-2005* (Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2007), chapter 1 and the 1972 United States Intelligence Board photograph caption, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/159886efc8ff17ac93a5ffc027d9a6a0/dci_leaders.pdf.
[^15]: Freedman and Clauser, "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," Physical Review Letters (1972), CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080052-7, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r000200080052-7; Proposed Grill Flame Protocol, Task II, SRI 9-4186, May 8, 1979, biography and publications of Edwin C. May, CIA-RDP96-00788R001300080001-0, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00788r001300080001-0.