IO Files: A/C.1/SC.12/SR
Summary Record of the Second Meeting of Subcommittee 12 of the First Committee, Palais de Chaillot, Paris, October 15, 1948, 10:30 a. m.
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2. Discussion of the USSR draft resolution (document A/658)1
Mr. Malik (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), speaking on the substance of his draft resolution, noted that the USSR’s views on the [Page 471] matter of disarmament and the prohibition of atomic weapons had been repeatedly stated. It had been given in detail by Mr. Vyshinsky both in the plenary meetings of the General Assembly and in the Political Committee.
In proposing its draft resolution the USSR had taken as its starting point the situation created by the General Assembly resolutions of 24 January and 14 December 1946, which had not yet been implemented. The USSR delegation had repeatedly stated his views as to the reasons why those resolutions had not been carried out. Not only had the Commission for Conventional Armaments taken no practical steps towards proposing practical measures for the regulation and reduction of armaments and armed forces but it had adopted a joint United States and United Kingdom resolution2 which was interpreted by public opinion both in the United States and throughout the world as meaning that the idea of disarmament had been practically buried by the United Nations. In fact, two days after that resolution had been passed stating that no disarmament was possible until a series of prerequisites had been fulfilled, the United States Cable Bureau [sic] had announced that the United Nations had, in effect, failed in its three year old efforts to attain world disarmament. The USSR draft resolution took that fact as its point of departure in noting that practically nothing had been done to influence the General Assembly resolutions. The second point of the USSR draft resolution aimed at pointing out that the prohibition of the production and use of atomic energy for war is of the first importance. Thereafter, it noted that a general reduction of armaments would assist in establishing a durable peace, would strengthen international security and was in the interests of nations which sought to ease the heavy economic burden resulting from ever-increasing expenditure on armaments.
The draft resolution based itself on concrete reality in making the practical proposal that the five Great Powers, the permanent members of the Security Council, which bore the main responsibility for the maintenance of peace and international security and which possessed an overwhelming share of the armaments of the world, should take a first step of agreeing to reduce their existing land, naval and air forces by one third within a period of a year.
The second important step proposed was based upon the fact that no real reduction of armaments was possible without the prohibition of atomic weapons. The USSR delegation therefore proposed that atomic weapons be prohibited as weapons capable only of being used for aggression and not for defence.
[Page 472]The third point of the draft resolution was the establishment, within the framework of the Security Council, of an international control organ to supervise the carrying out of the measures proposed. These essential points were submitted for definite decision by the Sub-Committee.
Mr. Osborn (United States) examined the draft resolution paragraph by paragraph.
The first paragraph was unacceptable because a majority of nine members in both the Atomic Energy Commission and the Commission for Conventional Armaments considered the statement incorrect. The plan and proposals developed by the Atomic Energy Commission and now before the General Assembly constituted one of the finest pieces of treaty drafting accomplished in the United Nations. Sub-Committee 11 [111] had already agreed that the proposals were very important and should be voted upon. No concrete accomplishments could be recorded because two representatives had refused to accept any of the principles deemed necessary by the majority.
The Commission for Conventional Armaments also had worked very hard. Nine members had agreed upon the general principles which should govern the regulation and reduction of armaments and armed forces but those principles had been rejected in toto by two members. Mr. Osborn emphasized particularly the rejection by the USSR of the principle of safeguards and its refusal to recognize that the conditions of world security had anything to do with disarmament. Consequently the first paragraph of the USSR draft resolution was without foundation.
The second paragraph might be dismissed for a great number of reasons but the simplest reason was that the question of the prohibition and control of atomic energy was being dealt with by another organ of the United Nations.
The third paragraph would be acceptable only if it provided for a guarantee that no nation was arming in secret behind an “iron curtain”.
The next two paragraphs were not of particular importance but Mr. Osborn thought that the second of the two should specifically name the expansionists and reactionary elements referred to. It should state what nations had, after the end of the war, seized territory which had never belonged to them. The question would then be whether a reactionary government was one responsible to the people who elected them or one run by an iron military dictatorship.
The sixth paragraph, Mr. Osborn found astonishing. He recalled that the USSR representative had objected bitterly to the first paragraph of the resolution adopted by the Commission for Conventional Armaments stating that any system for the regulation and reduction [Page 473] of armaments and armed forces must initially include all States having “substantial military resources”. The USSR representative had opposed that principle as somehow a trick. Yet he now proposed to limit disarmament to the permanent members of the Security Council. Mr. Osborn could not accept the paragraph until the USSR representative had withdrawn his earlier statement of views to the Commission for Conventional Armaments or explained his change of views. Mr. Osborn could not take seriously, and almost every speaker in the Political Committee had taken the same view, a proposal for arms reduction made by a country which closed its frontiers to any possibility of control or verification. Had it been accompanied by a scheme for continuing verification he could have view[ed] it as made in good faith, though still looking on it as mistaken in method. Unless so accompanied, however, it had no meaning. The penultimate paragraph dealing with atomic energy had no place in the resolution.
Turning to the final paragraph Mr. Osborn stated that it provided for a body to perform the same function in planning for a control body as had been entrusted to the Commission for Conventional Armaments. That Commission, after serious study, had produced a short list of general principles which had been rejected by the USSR.
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He asked the representative of the USSR whether his Government would demonstrate its willingness to abandon its expansionist drive by withdrawing its fifth column from other States. Would it give up its veto over verification, inspection, and control. Was it prepared to open its frontiers so that the peoples of other nations might know what was going on and be relieved of the fear that activities behind the “iron curtain” made it necessary for them to arm? Mr. Osborn believed that every paragraph of the USSR draft resolution was intentionally framed to confuse the public mind and hide the fact that the USSR did not want others to know what armaments it was producing. He asked whether it was not a piece of effrontery for such a proposal as he had described to be submitted by a dictatorship, the most reactionary government in the world to-day, such as Generalissimo Stalin himself had described as “unlimited power resting upon violence and not upon law”.
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