A sacred trust: The formation of U.S. public policy on atomic energy, 1945-46

The 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, a working paper for official policy makers compiled by a committee headed by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, with the assistance of a Board of Consultants chaired by David E. Lilienthal, chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, was the first major written attempt at U.S. public policy formation after World War II. It was adopted as the basis for the 1946 U.S. proposals on the control of atomic energy, known as the Baruch Plan, in which Bernard M. Baruch, the U.S. Representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission added a series of measures to the idea of a world atomic energy development authority. This paper is an attempt to analyze certain institutional and political factors that underlay the U.S. policy formation in the context of U.S. foreign relations, as well as the conceptual and policy framework that characterized the Acheson-Lilienthal Report and the Baruch Plan.