500.A15A4 General Committee/893
Memorandum by the Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs (Moffat)
The Italian Ambassador14 came to see me this afternoon and read me a telegram of information which he had received from Mussolini this morning. It recounted the impressions picked up by Suvich on his recent trip to Paris, London and Brussels. Suvich had become convinced that there was no possibility of usefully initiating any talks before the meeting of May 29th, as the private and parallel effort of direct conversations had definitely failed. In the interim Italy would take no initiative. However, she could not help feeling that if the conference met under present circumstances it could only result in an inevitable liquidation of the disarmament effort with visible and invisible “grave consequences”. In the best of conditions, and realizing that Germany was not present, all that the General Commission could do would be to recognize that the present method offered no path out. In that case, both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations would suffer diminished prestige. The implication of the message was that the time would come when with judicious preparation the Italian plan could be acceptable as the ultimate solution but meanwhile they foresaw new difficulties and little cause for optimism.
I told the Ambassador that Mr. Davis had returned pretty discouraged but not hopeless and outlined some of his general views. The Ambassador said that if the decision of the Conference was to wind up—and he clearly thought that such would be its ultimate decision—it would have to be done with great skill and care so as not to precipitate a crisis or make the situation in Europe any worse. I told him that we must also bear in mind Henderson’s ever-pending threat to resign in case he felt that the Powers were abandoning any real effort to achieve disarmament. We had heard nothing about Henderson’s plans for some time, but inferred that he might eventually wish to provoke a crisis by requesting each nation to set forth the ultimate limit of its concessions. In this way it might be found that the points of divergence were not as great as we had feared or if not that the eventual resumption of efforts to disarm would start from the basis of these final statements and not from the positions taken under various contingencies during the past two and one-half years.
[Page 60]The Ambassador continued to feel that the outlook was pretty gloomy.
- Augusto Rosso.↩