500.A15A4 Steering Committee/15: Telegram
The Acting Chairman of the American Delegation (Gibson) to the Secretary of State
[Received March 16—11:30 a.m.]
80. The Bureau of the Conference met this morning and decided:
- (1)
- Not to start the discussions in the General Committee on article 1 of the draft convention until after the recess.
- (2)
- To prolong the recess one week, that is to say until April 11th, this will take care of the German elections and the parliamentary necessities of several of the chief delegates who are Ministers of Foreign Office.
I took no part in this discussion at all and merely acquiesced in the generally expressed desire.
However, in the General Commission I took occasion to introduce a resolution48 to the effect that when the General Commission reconvenes on April 11 that it or the Political Committee should sit continuously until they had arrived at sufficient decisions on principle to enable the technical committees to function usefully and that these commission meetings should not be interfered with by any meetings of the technical committees. This resolution was unanimously adopted with strong support from France, Italy, England, Germany and many others.
The Chairman of the Conference in a speech summarizing the work to the present, said that many delegations had submitted propositions which still remained unclarified and which they had not yet elaborated and therefore requested that during the period of the vacation all the memoranda possible should be submitted to the Secretariat tending to illustrate these proposals. With respect to the American delegation, the only one mentioned by name, he made particular reference to the proposal in our opening speech that the Conference could successfully devote itself to the abolition of weapons which are devoted primarily to aggressive war. Therefore this would indicate that it would be very desirable to introduce some time before the end of the vacation a memorandum defining what the American Government regards as weapons of this character and the reasons for the belief. I shall have a study of this proposition made here by our technical experts for submission to you as soon as possible in order that it may be transmitted to the Secretariat during the vacation.
[Page 54]There are further meetings of technical committees and sub-committees for the remainder of the week.
- For text, see League of Nations, Records of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, Series B: Minutes of the General Commission, vol. i, p. 32.↩