500.A14/632a
The Secretary of State to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (Pittman)
My Dear Senator Pittman: It is my understanding that the Convention for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War, signed at Geneva, June 17, 1925,2 and transmitted by President Coolidge to the Senate for its advice and consent to ratification on January 11, 1926, is still before the Committee on Foreign Relations. I should greatly appreciate it if you could take such steps as you may deem appropriate to secure favorable action on this Convention by the Committee and by the Senate.
Since this Convention was transmitted to the Senate, the Department has, on several occasions, urged that it be given favorable consideration, and President Hoover, in a message of January 10, 1933,3 recommended that the Senate give its advice and consent to its ratification. The President is entirely in accord with the views of his two immediate predecessors in regard to the advisability of the ratification of this Convention by this Government.
Enlightened public opinion throughout the world has, for many years, urged the adoption on the international plane of measures of supervision and control of the international traffic in arms. A Convention to this end was signed by the representatives of twenty-eight governments, including our own, at St. Germain-en-Laye and Paris on September 10, 1919.4 This Convention was in several respects unsatisfactory to this Government, and it was never submitted to the Senate. As long as the United States, which is one of the principal arms manufacturing powers, refused to ratify the Convention of St. Germain, the other powers naturally refused to subject themselves to [Page 450] limitations which would have resulted, not in the control of the arms traffic, but in its transfer to those countries which were not parties to the Convention. Other governments, realizing the necessity for some measure of supervision and control of the international traffic in arms, urged us on several occasions to state our objections to the Convention of St. Germain in order that a new Convention might be drawn up from which these objections would be eliminated. As a result of this attitude on the part of other governments, meetings, at which this Government was represented, were held in Geneva in 1924,5 and these meetings resulted in the drafting of a new Convention, which contained none of the features of the Convention of St. Germain to which this Government had made objection. The Arms Traffic Convention of 1925 is, in all essentials, based upon this Draft Convention. The whole history of the Convention is, therefore, such as to constitute for this Government a moral obligation to ratify it.
The important provisions of the Convention are those limiting the export of arms to those intended for the direct supply of the government of the importing state, or with the consent of such government for the supply of a public authority subordinate to it, and those setting up a machinery of licenses or export declarations for all arms exported or imported and for full publicity in regard to the international traffic in arms. These measures would go far to curb the abuses of the international traffic in arms. The Convention has already been ratified by a number of the signatories. Some of these ratifications are, however, conditional upon ratification by other specified powers, including, among those which have not ratified, the United States. We have reason to believe that ratification by this Government would probably result, within a brief interval, in the other ratifications necessary to put the Convention into effect. The ratification of this Convention is an important contribution which the American Government and people can make at this time to the cause of world peace; its remaining unratified cannot fail to produce, with justification, the impression that we are indifferent to the important problems with which the Convention deals.
Sincerely yours,
- Ibid., p. 61.↩
- Congressional Record, vol. 76, pt. 2, p. 1448.↩
- Foreign Relations, 1920, vol. i, p. 180.↩
- Meetings of the League of Nations Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments; see Foreign Relations, 1924, vol. i, pp. 17 ff.↩