Abolition of Aggressive Weapons

Report Outline
The Kellogg Pact and Renunciation of Aggressive Weapons
Proposals of Major Powers for Abolition of Aggressive Weapons
Efforts to Abolish Battleships and Submarines
Abolition of Poison Gas and Other Aggressive Weapons
Economies from Abolition of Aggressive Weapons
Special Focus

The Kellogg Pact and Renunciation of Aggressive Weapons

Proposals for the total abolition of various kinds of so-called aggressive weapons were contained in many of the initial suggestions advanced by the nations at the opening of the World Disarmament Conference last February. Although there is little chance that the more far-reaching of these proposals will be adopted, they have furnished one main avenue of attack upon the whole disarmament question. Renunciation of aggressive weapons by international agreement has been urged as a logical sequence to the world's acceptance of the Kellogg pact outlawing war as an instrument of national policy. In his first speech to the conference, February 9, 1932, Ambassador Gibson, acting head of the American delegation, said:

Since practically all the nations of the world have now pledged themselves not to wage aggressive war, we believe this conference should and can successfully devote itself to the abolition of weapons which are devoted primarily to aggressive war, and we arp prepared to give earnest and sympathetic consideration to any plans or proposals which seem to furnish a practicable and sound basis upon which we may effect a general limitation and reduction of armament and establish a more healthy and peaceful state of affairs.

It has been evident from the beginning of the conference that realization of a policy of renunciation of aggressive weapons would be beset with practical difficulties. Just as it has been found impossible to discover a universally satisfactory method of defining an aggressor in war, so is it difficult to find a satisfactory definition of aggression as applied to instruments of warfare. Almost every weapon considered primarily aggressive by one or more powers is deemed primarily defensive by other powers. The technical committees of the conference are now working on the problem of determining “those weapons whose character is the most specifically offensive or those most efficacious against national defense or those most threatening to civilians.”