Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, East Asia and the Pacific, Volume VI

694.001/10–2650

Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, by the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Rusk)

top secret

[Washington,] October 26, 1950.

Subject: Japanese Peace Treaty

Participants:	John Foster Dulles—USUN
	Dean Rusk—Assistant Secretary

I discussed with Mr. Dulles his proposal to hand Mr. Malik¹ an additional aide-mémoire (copy attached) in connection with paragraph 3(c) of the memorandum on the Japanese Peace Treaty.² The latter memorandum has been handed by him to each of the delegations with whom he discussed the Japanese Peace Treaty and it can be assumed that the Soviets have a copy or the substance thereof from press reports.

I told Mr. Dulles that our view here was that it might be disadvantageous to give the Soviets an additional aide-mémoire and that as a matter of negotiating procedure, it might be better to handle the matter orally. I said we looked upon this first talk as a preliminary meeting and that we should not go any further with commitments than we have to pending some expression of Soviet views. I said we thought that it might be better, rather than to mention the Cairo Declaration, to say that the question of Formosa was before the United Nations and that it might be well to see how that discussion progressed before reaching any flat formula in connection with a possible peace settlement.

Mr. Dulles said that he accepted that method of handling and had suggested an additional aide-mémoire in order to try to head off a violent Soviet propaganda charge that we were scrapping the Potsdam and Cairo Declarations, etc. I said that we would probably get the propaganda charge anyhow and that further pieces of paper on the subject might be interpreted by the Soviets as documentary proof that their charges were well founded.

In closing Mr. Dulles expressed some dismay at what he thought was the unnecessarily unfavorable position into which we had moved by publicly threatening the use of the veto in the matter of the Secretary General.³

[Attachment]

Revision 3

Aide-mémoire with respect to paragraph 3 (c).

It could be assumed that if the Japanese Peace Treaty were multilateral and the Soviet Union a party thereto, Japan would, by the treaty, cede South Sakhalin and the Kuriles to the Soviet Union.

As regards Formosa and the Pescadores, it is believed that it is appropriate for the United Nations to consider further and if so, how, the purpose of the Cairo Declaration could be carried out consistently with the obligations of Article 73 of the United Nations Charter, which obligations have now been assumed by the nations which were allied against Japan.

October 25, 1950

1. See the memorandum infra.
2. Of September 11, p. 1296.
3. For documentation pertinent to this question, see vol. ii, pp. 87 ff.