"To Keep This Genii Bottled Up": United States Policy on the Dissemination of Gas Enrichment Technology, 1960–74

This paper discusses a little known aspect of the U.S. government’s multipronged effort during the 1960s and later to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons capabilities. Beginning in 1960, Washington began to treat gas centrifuge technology as a secret because of its potential as a cheap method to enrich uranium for reactor fuel or for nuclear weapons. Underscoring the importance of early U.S. program to prevent this new technology’s dissemination, the gas centrifuge later became central to controversies with Pakistan and recently with Iran. Breakthroughs in gas centrifuge technology in 1960 created apprehension about the implications for nuclear weapons proliferation. The possibility that gas centrifuge plants could be established secretly prompted Washington to support a policy of information and export controls, classifying this new technology in concert with the Dutch, West Germans, and British, who were also developing it. While U.S. arms control specialists recognized that classification could not prevent the spread of the technology, secrecy remained a fundamental strategy. The paper will explore the motives at work in influencing U.S. policy: nonproliferation, preserving technological advantages, and protecting the U.S. monopoly of highly enriched uranium sales. It further examines how Washington balanced those concerns with other objectives, including its longstanding support for European integration and controlling West German nuclear capabilities. The impact and interplay of these objectives will inform the discussion of key moments during the 1960s, from the origins of the classification program in 1960 to the end of the decade when the U.S. let the British use technological secrets so they could participate in a commercial uranium enrichment project with the Dutch and Germans.  The paper will conclude by reflecting on the limits of information controls which failed to prevent A.Q. Khan’s 1975 theft of centrifuge technology from the Dutch.