500.A15 b/39: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Secretary of the American Representation on the Preparatory Commission ( Marriner )
85. Your despatch No. 190, December 9, and your telegrams Nos. 159 and 160, November 29 and December 1, 1926,17 regarding Subcommittee B and Joint Commission report. Please address immediately to the Secretariat a letter in the following general terms, with the request that it be circulated to the governments concerned:
Refer to the decision of Sub-committee B of the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament Conference providing for the submission in writing before December 31 of the views of the governments on the Joint Commission Report. State that your government has received copies of the Joint Commission report only within the past few days, and has not yet had sufficient time to study it and make, before December 31, a detailed statement of its views thereon, as it will desire to do. Therefore, your Government hopes that when its views have been transmitted to the Secretariat, which it hopes will be within a month, the Secretariat will cause these views to be circulated to the various governments. Pending the above-mentioned submission of its detailed views on the Joint Commission report, your Government wishes to draw attention to the statement in regard to the American position appearing in the preamble to the report of Sub-committee B (page 2 your despatch No. 190),18 and to add that, while this statement refers to the American position in regard to those questions considered both by Sub-committee A and the Joint Commission, there were certain questions before the Joint Commission which were not before Sub-committee A. With respect to these latter questions your Government wishes you to make it abundantly clear that it does not accept the conclusions of the Joint Commission’s report, and that in its forthcoming commentary concerning the Joint Commission’s report, it will set forth its detailed views as to the whole of the report in question.
Department will endeavor to forward by pouch, to reach you not later than the end of January, statement in question.