When President Dwight Eisenhower was invited to address the still young United Nations 50 ago yesterday, he confronted a world poised on the brink of potentially devastating conflict. There had been war on the Korean Peninsula, a divided Germany was a superpower flashpoint, and the nuclear competition with the Soviets had blossomed into an unpredictable and ever more deadly arms race.

But Eisenhower, the warrior, stunned many people on December 8, 1953, by offering what is still recognized as one of the most idealistic, if not dreamy, disarmament proposals in history. It was a speech that planted seeds of hope, but also, many experts now agree, led to at least some of the gloom that exists, in the post 9/11 era, over what seems like the inevitable spread of nuclear weapons into hostile hands.

Eisenhower delivered an address called "Atoms for Peace," which, in its almost painfully formal and florid language, called on both the United States and the Soviets to eventually abandon their nuclear arsenals and hand over the secrets of the atom to a U.N. body that would use them to produce an age of prosperity and peace.

He was committed, the ex-general said, to reversing "the fearful engines of atomic might" and countering "the hopeless finality of a belief that two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world."

Instead, Eisenhower urged, the two powers should start handing over their uranium and other bomb-making materials to the newly created International Atomic Energy Agency and freely share nuclear technology with those who would apply it to commercial power generation, agriculture and medicine.

"The United States pledges before you -- and therefore before the world -- its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma -- to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life," the Republican president concluded. He was not alone in his hope that the nuclear genie could somehow be returned to the bottle. The spectacle of atomic warfare so terrified those who understood it that the push for disarmament dawned almost before the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had cooled.

On Oct. 3, 1945, less than two months after the first atomic bomb had been dropped, President Harry Truman wrote to Congress, "The hope of civilization lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb."

The difference was that while Truman's proposals for cooperative atomic research made little headway, Eisenhower's ideas generated concrete programs.

While mutual suspicion prevented Washington and Moscow from abandoning their nuclear arsenals -- at its peak, the United States fielded more than 32,000 warheads -- they did implement a series of treaties reducing those numbers.

The two sides also agreed to share what they considered to be the benefits of the atom. But what Eisenhower envisioned as the road to unprecedented prosperity turned into a Faustian bargain.

Under the Atoms for Peace program, countries that renounced nuclear weapons development were given research reactors and other nuclear technologies. But what were supposed to be benevolent gestures turned into another form of competition, as the United States and the Soviets began rewarding their friends with what became an international status symbol -- research reactors.

At the same time, there was too little policing of what those countries did with the reactors. The programs became training grounds for weapons scientists who, in some instances, produced bomb-making materials.

A bizarre range of countries, including the Congo, Ghana, Jamaica, Peru, Syria, Turkey, Bangladesh, Algeria and Colombia, were provided reactors by both countries. The Soviets also spread them around Eastern Europe.

In a paper delivered to a scientific conference on the anniversary of Atoms for Peace, Leonard Weiss, a consultant at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, explained how the U.S. all but gave nuclear weapons to India by training Indian scientists and providing reactor technology and materials.

"The world has paid a price for the early euphoric embrace of Atoms for Peace, when the spread of nuclear technology was unaccompanied by adequate consideration of proliferation risks," wrote Weiss.

The temptation by the superpowers to maintain stockpiles of nuclear weapons has also proven overpowering. Washington and Moscow have negotiated treaties banning the possession of biological and chemical weapons, also known as weapons of mass destruction, but not the significantly more destructive nuclear warheads.

Still, some experts argue, things could have been worse. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy had predicted that there might be 25 nuclear states or more in a decade or so. Today, there are nine known nuclear states - - the United States, Russia, France, Britain, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and (probably) North Korea. The majority of them are democracies, or close to it.

The Atoms for Peace concept also spawned the inspections programs conducted by the IAEA, for instance, and helped lay the groundwork for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. However imperfect, the treaty helped roll back nuclear weapons programs that had once existed in Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, South Africa and South Korea.

"In the final analysis," wrote Peter Lavoy, an arms expert at the Naval Postgraduate School, in the December issue of Arms Control Today, "Eisenhower was no more or less successful than his successors in trying to balance the possession and possible use of nuclear forces for America's defense with efforts to discourage other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons."

©2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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