Surface treatment techniques for inhibiting stress corrosion cracking of austenitic stainless steels are discussed in the light of a proposed mechanism for stress corrosion cracking. Criteria for selecting stress corrosion inhibitors are developed. Several inhibitors selected on the basis of these criteria were applied as surface treatments on Type-304 stainless-steel U-bends. Time-to-cracking improvements of fifty to several hundred percent wre found with very limited amounts of the inhibitors present.