Office of the Historian

500.A15A4 General Committee/433: Telegram

The Chairman of the American Delegation (Davis) to the Acting Secretary of State

Geneva, June 1, 1933—2 p.m.
[Received June 1—11:05 a.m.]

681. 1. Under cover of a letter to the Secretary General of the Conference the French delegation has today circulated an amendment to part II, section II (material)46 to be considered in the first reading of the British draft. This constitutes an additional chapter upon the limitation and supervision of the manufacture of, and trade in, war material. The French delegation has explained to me that it attaches great importance to the insertion in the convention of articles along the lines of those proposed before any limitation on material can be accepted by it. The main provisions of these amendments are as follows:

(a)
Quotas shall be fixed within the limits of which each of the high contracting parties may procure articles of war material whether by manufacture or import (a list of the categories of this war material along the lines of the 1925 traffic in arms convention is to be prepared as an annex).
(b)
The manufactures or imports of the said articles effected on behalf of other powers within the limits of the jurisdiction of each high contracting party must not have the effect of increasing by more than x percent the amount of the quotas assigned to it.
(c)
The Permanent Disarmament Commission shall judge whether the rate of supply of the said articles is in relation to the size of the quotas assigned and if the nature of supplies delivered to these contracting parties whose armed forces are subject to the provisions of [Page 180] part II, section I, chapter II, of the convention, answers to the requirements of the progressive standardization of war material.

2. The following conditions must be fulfilled before a high contracting party can order articles to be manufactured or permit them to be exported.

(a)
The characteristics of the arms shall comply with the present convention.
(b)
Export or manufacture shall take place with a view to direct supply to a government or to public authorities under its control.
(c)
Supplies of material to the consignee or importing power must be approved by the Permanent Disarmament Commission.

3. In every case of an order the governments shall issue export or manufacturing licenses which must be accompanied by a certificate from the Secretary General of the League attesting that the said supplies have been approved by the Permanent Disarmament Commission.

4. The delegation is at present engaged upon a study of these articles and I shall shortly telegraph you any suggestions which may result from this study.

Davis
  1. For text, see Records of the Conference, Series B, Minutes of the General Commission, vol. ii, pp. 591–593.↩