Dutch Atomic Submarine
In December 1957 the United States had offered to help its NATO allies in the construction of nuclear submarines. The offer provoked interest from France, Italy, and the Netherlands.
In the late 1950s the Netherlands formed a Study Group for Nuclear Power, and later a Nuclear Power Working Group, to evaluate the prospects for an atomic submarine. Together with a number of employees from the Assessment and Design department at the Netherlands Reactor Center, as well as representatives of the shipbuilding industry in the Netherlands, a team made a design for a nuclear submarine to be built in the Netherlands. A new Dutch government, however, rejected the entire plan, and the construction of nuclear submarines did not take place.
The Eisenhower Administration's offer had alarmed some members of Congress, who contended that the Administration was attempting to turn over atomic secrets without a formal agreement. In May 1960 a tentative compromise had been agreed to by the Atomic Energy Commission and the State and Defense Departments. Under terms of the agreement the United States would provide the Netherlands with designs and technical assistance to build the submarine hull and the non-nuclear part of the propulsion machinery; but technical assistance on building the atomic power plant would be postponed until a later time.
In June 1960 the US Congress' Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy had held a secret committee meeting to hear testimony from AEC Chairman McCone and other members of the Eisenhower Administration on efforts to supply atomic submarine secrets to the Netherlands. A majority of the committee members opposed the proposal and feared that atomic submarine secrets might fall into Soviet hands. According to the New York Times, the Committee's opposition meant that there was no possibility that any plan would be approved in 1960 (New York Times, June 10, 1960). The Dutch would withdraw their request for an atomic submarine as Eisenhower's term was drawing to a close.
In the 1960s, when the NPT was being negotiated, it was reported that Italy was planning to build a nuclear powered naval tender and that the Dutch navy was interested in building nuclear submarines. Since the IAEA would not be allowed to inspect warships (and it was doubtful whether it had the authority do so under its Statute) it was agreed that safeguards in NPT non-nuclear-weapon States would apply only to nuclear material 'in peaceful nuclear activities'. These States were prohibited from acquiring or seeking to acquire nuclear explosive devices of any kind but they could use nuclear material for non-explosive military purposes such as the engines of warships.
It was generally recognized that this was a serious loophole in the safeguards prescribed by the Treaty. A State might simply refuse access to IAEA inspectors, claiming that the material they wanted to inspect was destined for a naval reactor, or that the reactor they wanted to look at was the prototype of a submarine engine. The Director General had drawn the attention of the Safeguards Committee (1970) to the problem. The Secretariat had done its best to block the loophole by proposing several conditions to the Committee (which it accepted and incorporated into INFCIRC/153) that the State concerned would have to comply with before withdrawing nuclear material from safeguards for non-explosive military use. For nearly 20 years nothing more was heard of the Italian and Dutch plans, nor of any other proposals by nonnuclear- weapon States to build nuclear propelled naval vessels. It appeared that the loophole in the NPT was becoming a dead letter.
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