The Press WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1946. Disarmament

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 25061, 18 December 1946, Page 6

The Press WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1946. Disarmament

On October 28 the United Nations General Assembly turned to discussion of the Soviet demand, fruitlessly presented two months earlier to the Security Council, for information on the strength of Allied armed forces in non-enemy countries outside their own borders. The following day Mr Molotov moved a four-clause resolution on disarmament. In it he asked the Assembly (i) to declare that, to strengthen international peace and security, a general reduction of armaments was necessary; (ii) to affirm that in implementing a decision to reduce armaments a primary object should be the banning of the manufacture and use of atomic energy for military purposes; (iii) to recommend the Security Council to take practical measures to these ends; and (iv) to appeal to all member States to support the Security Council in its task. The census proposal was so broadened during the next month by successive counter-demands as to become inextricably part of the disarmament question; and this itself became a dialectic maze, in which committees and sub-committees groped for another three weeks. In the outcome, as “The Times” yesterday surveyed it, all the 54 member States of the United Nations pledged themselves to reduce armaments—a pledge, it comments, which the Assembly will doubtless rate as the session’s major achievement. In particular, the 54 nations have instructed the Security Council to draft measures designed not only to reduce arms and armed forces and to regulate for the exclusion of atomic weapons and other means of mass destruction, but to establish a system of inspection to ensure that arms reduction agreements are honoured. On the Security Council, also, now rests the responsibility of unravelling the issues raised by the Soviet demand for a troops census—of determining, for instance, whether it is enough to ask only for the information Russia narrowly seeks, or whether one or more of the counter-demands should be met. Most of the arguments the General Assembly heard in the seven weeks of debate thus remain to be settled in the Security Council; and the veto remains a sharp weapon. The “ principle of

*• unanimity ”, as Mr Molotov conceded, “ has no relevance to the “ work of arms control ”; but unanimity “is necessary in adopting the “ regulations for control ”. The real work, in short, still lies ahead. The Assembly’s “ major achieve- “ ment ”, has been to approve, broadly, the proposal Mr Molotov submitted seven weeks ago; and that proposal, as Field-Marshal Smuts then observed, had been heard and the pledge it called for been given when the United Nations Charter was written.