Quebec Agreement
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The Quebec Agreement was an Anglo-Canadian-American document which outlined the terms of nuclear nonproliferation between the United Kingdom and the United States. It was signed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt on August 19, 1943 in Quebec City, Canada.
The agreement was needed because nuclear co-operation between the United States and Britain and Canada was becoming so difficult that Winston Churchill had sought information about setting up an entirely separate British atomic bomb project. However in July 1943 in London American officials cleared up some major misunderstandings about British motives and the agreement was drafted.
After the signing the British handed over all of their material to the Americans and in return received all the copies of the American progress reports to the President. The British atomic research was then subsumed into the Manhattan Project until after the war and a large team of British and Canadian scientists moved to the USA.
In a section of the Quebec Agreement formally entitled "Articles of Agreement governing collaboration between the authorities of the U.S.A. and UK in the matter of Tube Alloys", Britain and the USA agreed to share resources to bring the Tube Alloys [i.e. the Atomic Bomb] project to fruition at the earliest moment.
The leaders agreed that
- we will never use this agency against each other,
- we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent, and
- we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.
The agreement also established a Combined Policy Committee composed of Canadian, British, and American representatives to oversee and coordinate weapons development. It was also agreed that any post-war advantages of an industrial or commercial nature would be decided at the discretion of the U.S. President. It is in no way clear from the document whether 'industrial or commercial' was intended to include 'military' as well, but this is the interpretation the Americans used afterwards, much to the displeasure of the British.
One of the major strains of the Agreement came up in 1944, when it was revealed to the U.S. that the UK had earlier made a secret agreement with Hans von Halban to share nuclear information with France postwar in exchange for free use of a number of patents relating to nuclear reactors which had been filed by Frederic Joliot and his Collège de France team. Upon discovering this, the U.S. objected that it violated the terms of the Quebec Agreement, namely the section about the third-party information sharing. At Churchill's urging, the British broke their obligations to the French in order to satisfy the Americans.
After the war, the British were excluded from American nuclear research and so set up their own atomic bomb program, though they had much information from their joint work on the Manhattan Project.
