The Atomic Energy Act of 1946, informally known as the McMahon Act, determined how the United States government would control and manage the nuclear technology it had developed. Most significantly it ruled that nuclear weapon development and nuclear power management would be under civilian, rather than military, control, and established the Atomic Energy Commission for this purpose. It was sponsored by Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat from Connecticut, the chair of the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy whose hearings lead to the fine-tuning and passing of the Act.

The Act passed through both houses of Congress and was signed by President Harry Truman on August 11946 and it went into effect on January 11947.

One of the provisions of the Act was a strict ban on the release of atomic technology to other powers, even to allies. This served to galvanize countries such as the United Kingdom, which had supplied personnel and information to the Manhattan Project team into constructing their own nuclear weapons.

The provisions of the Act were substantially modified by the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.

External links

• Text of the passed McMahont Act (PDF, scanned from the Congressional Record)
• Text of the passed McMahon Act (re-typed as HTML)

1946 in law | Nuclear history of the United States | Nuclear weapons infrastructure of the United States | United States federal energy legislation