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Whether Colorado's uranium would ultimately be used for peace or war depended on many questions and many men. But U.S. businessmen would be ready for either eventuality, thanks to something that happened on a chill May day last year in Arco, Idaho. That was the day a new kind of atomic reactor, built by Westinghouse, was first operated successfully. The reactor, pilot model of a plant to power the world's first atomic submarine, solved a key problem. The problem: since less than 1% of the world's uranium is fissionable, it might soon be exhausted as a fuel. The Arco reactor not only generated electricity, but "bred" fissionable plutonium from U-235 at the same time, thus making it possible to utilize all of the uranium that can be extracted from the earth's surface for fuel. Said Westinghouse's President Gwilym Price: "The Idaho plant is the 'Kitty Hawk' of the atomic power industry."
On the strength of that success, the Atomic Energy Commission selected Westinghouse to build a "fullscale power reactor" capable of producing a minimum of 60,000 kw. of electrical energy for industrial use. Thus atomic power for industry, until 1953 merely a scientist's dream, had actually started. Onetime Investment Banker Lewis Strauss, new chairman of AEC, and his fellow commissioners agree that the best way to make atomic power plants an everyday reality is to end the Government monopoly and let private industry do more of the job.
How to Save a Buck
Both in and outside Government, the leaders of private industry shouldered more public responsibilities. Henry Ford II sounded the call for freer world trade, then put aside his auto job and went to work at the U.N., where his very name was symbolic of the high wages of the U.S. free-enterprise system. In his book, Freedom's Faith, Inland Steel's Clarence Randall, another of the new internationalists, wrote: "The new corps of business leaders . . . hold in their competent hands the future of free enterprise ... It is their mission ... to keep America strong." Then he accepted the challenge himself by heading a commission aimed at turning "trade, not aid" from slogan into fact.
The businessmen who went to Washington—George Humphrey, Charles E. Wilson, Robert T. Stevens, et al.—proved that many of the methods of private industry could be used with great profit in Government, notably in eliminating waste. Before they were through, they chopped $13 billion from the 1953-54 Truman budget, cut the federal payroll by 176,000.
No governmental cost was too small to try to make smaller. By standardizing purchases of everything from office furniture to paper clips and toilet tissue. General Services Administrator Edmund Mansure, a Chicago textileman and the Government's chief housekeeper, saved $133 million. In the Post Office, switching from heavy canvas to nylon mail sacks will save $800,000 a year in freight.