Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

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Keith Middlemas. Orchestrating Europe (Text Only)

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DEDICATION

To my grandchildren:Hugo, Georgia, Fabian, Isabella

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At the headquarters of the ECSC in Luxembourg, Jean Monnet was also concerned at the drift in events. Unaware that the French government was indifferent to his fate, he decided to make his continuance as chairman of the High Authority contingent upon progress on the European front. Rather than start afresh, or pick over the wreckage of the EDC disaster to see what could be salvaged, he considered that the best approach would be to build outwards from the existing community. This could be extended into inland transport in general, into other classical energy forms (particularly electricity generation) or, and this was to be the key to its success, into atomic power. Nuclear energy was seen as an exciting new prospect where there had been little time for entrenched interests to emerge; yet the costs of developing it were too heavy for a single country to bear. This last consideration, however, had not prevented most industrial nations from embarking on experimental programmes of their own. The French government, especially, was extremely keen on developing nuclear cooperation and particularly wanted jointly to construct an isotope separation plant, a necessary but expensive component in developing enriched uranium for future reactors and nuclear bombs. Unknown at the time, it was in December 1954 that the French nuclear energy agency began to implement a five-year programme to manufacture a French nuclear bomb.26

The question of a nuclear community, EURATOM, was one of the items on the agenda when the foreign ministers of the Six met in Messina in June 1955 and it was adopted for further study alongside a patchwork of other initiatives (the main one of which was a common market, which we will return to below). The first results of this study envisaged that EURATOM would acquire a monopoly of all nuclear material and its transformation into products for fission. EURATOM would also build and control its own nuclear installations, including an isotope separation plant, financed from a common budget. Finally, it would administer a common market in all these materials and equipment. The one point it did not touch on was the relation of this structure to national military programmes, such as the one already underway in France. At this juncture the French suggested a moratorium on the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons for five years, which did not affect the French programme because it would not be ready for such tests until after this period. The military problem was part of a wider one that, mid–way through the negotiations, was beginning to sap EURATOM’s rationale. It was never envisaged that EURATOM would be the sole European nuclear programme, merely that it would assist and facilitate (and to some extent control) parallel national programmes.27

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