Joining nations 1947-1990

SIX

A DIPLOMATIC CRISIS AND A PERIOD OF FURTHER PROGRESS, 1965-1975

BY 1965 the ripples which appeared in 1961 had subsided and the Institute entered a further phase of steady development, a new element in which was the detailed attention given by the recently appointed Technical Committee to particular problems facing various Commissions and to the relative priorities of their work. Indeed the establishment of the Technical Committee was the most significant and durable innovation which took place during the Presidency of Professor Ruhl whose successor was chosen by the Governing Coun– cil at the 1965 Assembly in Paris and took up office the following year in Delft. The new President was Mr Fred Plummer, the second American to hold this office, though nationality was one of the few things he had in common with the previous American President, Dr Biers, whose death was to occur in 1967. While the latter was cosmopolitan and sophisticated, a high level negotiator as much at ease in Paris and London as in New York, Fred Plummer was a welding engineer who had become Director of the American Welding Society, the kind of American who takes pride in extolling the virtues of apple pie. As it happened, his nerve and his robust common sense were immediately to be put to the test. At the time in question, the cold war was being vigorously waged and it was inevitable that it should impinge to some extent upon the IIW, given the essential role of welding in the defence industries, notably at that time in the construction of nuclear submarines. Thus it happened that certain delegations contained members who passed as experts but whose primary interest was in the containment, on the one hand, and the collection, on the other, of classified information. Unfortunately, at the end of the 1966 Assembly in Delft, an incident occurred which led to the death of a member of a national delegation and subsequently to the severance of diplomatic relations between his country and the Netherlands. Relations between the delegation concerned and the IIW were also extremely strained for several years 37