DISARMAMENT. The word disarmament is used to cover two distinct conceptions : first, the complete abolition of all military armament, desired by a certain school of advanced thinkers ; second, the reduction and limitation of national arma ments by a general international agreement accepted by all, or almost all, States. In the former sense of the word, disarmament cannot yet be said to be practical politics. In the second sense it is one of the great problems of the day.
Since the War great armaments, almost on the 1914 scale, have been maintained, but nevertheless disarmament in the second sense has become a matter of practical politics.
Although it was one-sided, this disarmament of the former enemy powers was nevertheless a considerable factor in the general post-War situation and in itself did much to make general disarmament practically important. For, apart from its obvious political effect, the preamble to Part V. of the Treaty of Versailles contains an express obligation : "In order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations, Germany undertakes strictly to observe the military, naval and air clauses which follow." Provisions of the Covenant.—In the second place, specific obligations with regard to disarmament were imposed upon all the members of the League of Nations by Article 8 of the Covenant. In this article, recognized by the authors of the Covenant to be fundamental to the successful working of the League, the members "recognize that the maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations." The article goes on to pro vide that the Council of the League "shall formulate plans for such reduction for the consideration and action of the several governments." To this must also be added the final act of the Conference of Locarno in 1925, in which new undertakings to carry out Article 8 were made by the Great Powers there as sembled.
Third, these obligations have been supported by the personal pledges of statesmen of all parties and countries. Thus among British statesmen Lord Grey, Lord Cecil, Mr. Macdonald, Mr. Baldwin, Sir Austen Chamberlain and others have declared that both in the interests of the British empire and of the world at large it is necessary to secure a general and mutual reduction of armaments without delay. Lord Grey summed up their argu ments in a single sentence by saying that "if civilization cannot destroy armaments, armaments will destroy civilization." Article 8 of the Covenant is an undertaking by the members of the League to co-operate in preparing a plan of disarmament and in making the treaty required to bring that plan into effect.
In the fulfilment of this task the principal role is assigned to the council, which has first to prepare a plan for the "considera tion and action of the several governments," and which is sub sequently to control its observance.
The Temporary Mixed Commission.—It was not the coun cil, however, but the Assembly of the League which took the first important step towards executing Article 8. At the first Assembly in 192o a resolution was adopted calling for the creation (by the council) of a special committee of experts of various kinds to study disarmament and to draft a scheme. On this committee, the "Temporary Mixed Commission," there were appointed military, naval, air, economic and financial experts, and to them were added also some persons of political experience. It first met in 1921 and early in its discussions Lord Esher produced a scheme, restricted to the limitation of the land-armaments of Europe.
But the European members of the Commission almost unani mously rejected this scheme. They contended that reduction of armaments could not come alone but must be accompanied by arrangements, supplementary to those of the Covenant, for ensuring the security of members of the League against aggressive attack. This conclusion was summarized in four resolutions drafted by Lord Robert (now Viscount) Cecil and adopted by the Temporary Mixed Commission and subsequently by the third Assembly in 1922, the gist of which was that disarmament to be effective must be general, and that "security" and disarmament must go together.
Security Negotiations.—On the foundation of these four important resolutions the Temporary Mixed Commission pro ceeded in the following year to draw up the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance. The purpose of this draft treaty was to pro vide a system of general security which would permit the calling of a disarmament conference. Disarmament was intimately linked to the general scheme by the provision that none of its undertakings of mutual guarantee would come into effect until a plan of disarmament had been actually adopted and carried out. The treaty of mutual assistance was not, in fact, adopted by the succeeding Assembly, but the fifth Assembly in g24 elaborated the Geneva protocol, which was founded on the same principles and which again was conditional upon disarmament. (See SECURITY.) The Geneva protocol, in its turn, failed to secure sufficient acceptance by leading governments to bring it into force, and instead, the method of regional pacts was attempted in the Locarno treaties. This again failed to produce a general sense of security and so at the eighth Assembly in 1927 the whole question of security as the basis for disarmament was again raised, and the Assembly unanimously adopted resolutions which restated the two fundamental principles upon which the earlier negotiations of the Temporary Mixed Commission and the fifth Assembly had been conducted. These principles were : First, that "every state should be sure of not having to provide unaided for its security by means of its own armaments, but should be able to rely also on the organized collective action of the League of Nations." Second, that "there should be systematic prepara tion of the machinery to be employed by the organs of the League with a view to enabling the members of the League to perform their obligations" by joint action against an aggressor.
Thus the whole course of the discussions and negotiations on the subject between 1919 and 1927 proved conclusively the essential connexion between security and disarmament. On the problem of security those years witnessed much progress, though generally acceptable results were not definitely obtained. In other respects, however, less progress was made. Quite apart from the problem of security, disarmament itself in its technical and technical-political aspects is an extremely intricate matter. It can hardly be expected that other governments will accept freely the simple but drastic system imposed on Germany and her allies, desirable though it might be that they should do so.
Technical Difficulties.—But the technical difficulties of a more elastic system are great. The success of the Washington naval conference (see WASHINGTON I REATY) did not give any indication of the lines on which they could be solved, for not only is naval disarmament infinitely simpler than military and air disarmament, but even among naval units the Washington treaties dealt with only two categories of fighting ships.
The failure of the conference convened by President Coolidge in 1927, on the other hand, showed how greatly technical diffi culties may complicate the political problem of finding agreement about armaments, unless adequate technical solutions for them have been prepared and adopted in advance. Happily, even be fore tl-e Coolidge conference met, the sixth Assembly of the League in 1925 recognized the importance of this side of the matter and decided that its study should be begun in order that, when security had been obtained, the work of the disarmament conference might be rapidly carried through. On the proposal of the sixth Assembly, the council set up the so-called preparatory commission, which through two technical sub-committees (one military and one economic) made an exhaustive study of all the technical problems involved in a general disarmament treaty. On the basis of the reports of these sub-committees the prepara tory commission began, March 1927, to draw up a draft general treaty into which the Disarmament Conference could fit the scales of armament on which it might agree. At its session in March 1927 the commission made some progress with its draft treaty, agreeing on methods for limitation of man-power in armies, navies and air forces, and for the limitation of military aircraft. It could reach no agreement on naval questions, however, and its draft scheme is still most imperfect. The eighth Assembly, however, urged that its work should be rapidly completed, and perhaps under this stimulus definite results may be obtained. The prospect of definite results has been strengthened by the move ment of opinion created by the resignation of Lord Cecil from the British Cabinet in Aug. 1927. The ground for his resignation was that the British government might have avoided the failure of the Coolidge conference had they attached sufficient weight to the making of a naval agreement with the United States. It is also necessary to mention the proposals of the U.S.S.R. for total dis armament within four years put forward in the Preparatory Com mission in Nov. 1927 by the Russian delegate, Litvinoff. Litvinoff offered on behalf of his government to accept any reasonable com promise that would mean a real reduction of armament. In con clusion, it may be said that the negotiations on disarmament which have so far taken *place have been based on the following generally accepted principles : i.—That general security is a necessary condition of general dis armament ; 2.-That the organization of a system of "sanctions" through League of Nations machinery is the only road to security ; 3.—That to this end the "gap" in the Covenant, by which recourse to aggressive war is in certain cases legitimate, must be abolished, and aggressive war in all cases made an international crime; 4.—That no scheme of disarmament can succeed unless it is accepted by all or almost all governments and unless it covers every kind of weapon and military preparation; 5.—That only through the permanent machinery of the League can the necessary preliminary preparation for a disarmament conference be carried out ; 6.—That no plan for general disarmament will give confidence to governments and peoples unless it is supported by an international system of control and supervision, which again can only be organized through the machinery of the League; and ' 7.—That in a first disarmament treaty only small reductions will probably be made, but that there must be successive subsequent revi sions and reductions at regular intervals of time.