Controlled Disarmament

Report Outline
New Approach to Arms Limitation
Record of Past Disarmament Efforts
Current Proposals for Arms Control

New Approach to Arms Limitation

Ways and means of breaking the long deadlock over disarmament will be discussed intensively by the heads of government during the coming Big Four parley at Geneva. New Soviet arms-control proposals, submitted in May to a United Nations disarmament subcommittee, seemed to narrow the gap between western and Russian views on disarmament. Hope therefore has been nourished that President Eisenhower, Prime Minister Eden, Premier Faure, and Marshal Bulganin may be able to supply from the summit the fresh guidance and extra impetus needed to produce eventual agreement at the working level—an agreement which at last would put an end to an arms race that burdens and threatens the peoples of the world as no previous competition of the sort ever did.

President Eisenhower, at his news conference on July 6, left no doubt that the United States was going to Geneva with the earnest desire to explore new approaches to the complex problems of arms limitation and control. “We are going there honestly,” he said, “to present our case in a conciliatory, in a friendly attitude, and we don't intend to reject anything from mere prejudice or trueulence or any other lesser motive of that kind.”

Spokesmen for the 60 large and small nations represented at the anniversary meeting of the United Nations last month pledged renewed efforts to find some workable way both of getting around the atomic impasse and of setting limits to conventional armaments. Many of the diplomats at San Francisco felt there was a good chance that the Geneva conference might open the path to more fruitful continuing negotiations, based on the self-interest of all countries in preventing a nuclear war. When the chairman of the U.N. gathering, Eelco Van Kleffens of the Netherlands, summed up in a closing declaration what he termed the “sense of the meeting,” he said with respect to disarmament: