Disarmament : Six Months' Harvest
'INDOMITABLE optimists can at least assure each lother that after six months of a Disarmament Conference at Geneva disarmament is not substantially further off than it was. We may not have gone forward, but at least we have not gone backward. That no doubt is something, though there is a certain bleakness in such an outcome of six months' assiduous labour by the delegates of close on sixty nations, following on the systematic preparation of the soil for six years by an imposing League of Nations Commission. But is it true in fact that nothing has been accomplished ? A resolution certainly has been adopted, representing the maximum of agreement attain- able after these six months of discussions. It was not adopted unanimously, as Geneva resolutions usually are.
Indeed out of five great Powers in Europe two voted against it, and one abstained, not because it contained too much disarmament, but because it contained none worth having. The other two, Great Britain and France, who in an agreement appended to the main Lausanne accords had undertaken to " work together to find a solution of the disarmament question which will be beneficial and equitable for all the Powers concerned," found the resolution to their liking and voted for it. So I did the United States delegation, on the ground that it was " in the direction of " the Hoover proposal (in other words not a step backwards).
A resolution, then, exists, and it must be considered both absolutely, in regard to what it actually contains, and relatively, by comparison with other disarmament plans on which public attention has been rightly concen- trated. There has been notably the German contention, unanswerable logically, that the restrictions laid on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles in respect of certain weapons shall be accepted by all countries equally.
There is the Italian plan, fulfilling the German stipulations in detail by proposing the general abolition of all military aeroplanes, of capital ships and aircraft-carriers and submarines, of heavy land guns and tanks. There has been the more modest Hoover plan, making for a general reduction of existing armaments by about a third and providing particularly for the abolition of bombing aeroplanes, heavy land guns and tanks and the numerical reduction of capital ships to the extent of one-third by the only three Powers (the United States, Great Britain and Japan) that possess modern capital ships at all. Measured by the least ambitious of these plans, President Hoover's, the maximum of disarmament the Powers have been able to agree on in six months (plus six years) is little short of contemptible. Their resolution is, of course, rich in resonant phrases about convictions and intentions and resolves, but what the world wants to know is what it amounts to in terms of actual disarmament. What it amounts to in plain words is this : The calibre of heavy guns is to be limited—to a figure not yet decided ; the maximum size of tanks is to be limited—to a figure not yet decided. That literally is the sum-total of the agreements that can so far be recorded regarding concrete reduction and limitation of armaments. There are other points in the resolution. Steps are to be taken to humanise warfare ; chemical warfare is to be banned ; the Powers shall agree (not have agreed) to prohibit all bombing from the air and to that end military aircraft are to be limited by number and type (not abolished) ; a Permanent Disarmament Commission is to be set up to supervise the execution of such Disarmament Convention as may ultimately be drafted ; and in preparation for the second phase of the Conference next year consideration is to be given to the limitation of land effectives, naval limitation (about which no agreement at all has been reached as yet) and limitation of armaments expenditure. This, it is superfluous to observe, is not disarmament. It cannot even be represented as a substantial step towards disarmament. For there is no agreement to abolish any weapon at all ; rules for the humanisation of war, of very questionable value at the best, involve neither the reduction nor limitation of armaments ; and where there has been a decision at Geneva to limit the size of some weapon, such as tanks or heavy guns, there has been no decision as to what the limitation shall be. The responsibility for this breakdown must be explored. It has always been recognized that disarma- ment is mainly an affair of the Great Powers, and of the seven Great Powers of the world neither the United States, as the author of the Hoover Plan, nor Italy, nor Germany, nor Russia, can be held accountable for the Geneva failure. There remain our own country, France and Japan. Between France and ourselves we need not attempt to judge, for the prime, if not the only, concern of every Englishman is to satisfy himself as to how far his own Government has promoted or impeded the task of achieving real disarmament. For answer to that question it is only necessary to compare the British programme (an exiguous thing beside the hopes Sir John Simon encouraged in his speech on qualitative disarma- ment last April) with the Hoover proposals, far less exten- sive though these arc than either the German or the Italian plan. Mr. Hoover wants a third of the existing Washington battleships to be scrapped. The British Government refuses. He wants tanks to be scrapped. The British Government refuses. He wants bombing aero- planes to be scrapped. The British Government refuses. He proposes a substantial reduction in cruiser tonnage. The British Government offers instead a reduction in cruiser sizes, to take effect from 1947 onwards.
These are hard facts. Neither this country nor any other was called on to accept the Hoover plan in all details as it stood. But the Hoover plan did definitely mean a substantial measure of disarmament now, and a Government headed by a man who has declared as strongly and sincerely for disarmament as the present Prime Minister might have been expected, at any rate, to accept far more of the Hoover plan than it rejected. Instead of that it has rejected far more than it has accepted, in spite of identity of view regarding the limita- tion of heavy guns. There is no hint of equality of status for Germany either in the Geneva resolution or in the British proposals—and till there is there will be no dis- armament agreement. From the declaration made by Mr. MacDonald's Government during the London Naval Conference in favour of " an agreement by which the battleship would in due time disappear from the fleets of the world " there has been a definite and deplorable retreat. There is every reason to believe that in all this the Government completely misjudges the spirit of the country. The desire for a genuine and substantial reduc- tion of armaments—not unilaterally but by international agreement—is widespread. To refuse to reduce is to pro- claim complete mistrust of the Kellogg Pact, for if arma- ments cannot even be reduced to the Hoover level, that agreement is palpably meaningless. The Conference, it is true, is not over. There is still a chance of better things. But if we are to get them the first requisite so far as this country is concerned is leadership such as its representa- tives have never yet exercised at Geneva in favour of a measure of disarmament to which they have never yet consented.
Previous page
