NAVAL ARMAMENTS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21544, 16 January 1932, Page 11

NAVAL ARMAMENTS

MENACE TO WORLD SECURITY MOVEMENT FOR REDUCTION LEAD SET BY BRITAIN (British Official Wireless.) (United Press Association.) (By Electric Telegraph —Copyright.) RUGBY, January 14, (Received Jan. 15, at 5.5 p.m.) The statement that Britain would welcome the completion of the London Naval Treaty by an agreement between France, Italy, and herself was made by Captain Eden (Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs) in a speech at the Mansion House. He added: “It is a source of regret to us that our hopes have not yet been realised, and it would be a helpful send-off to the Disarmament Conference were it able to record in its early stages concurrence of two of the largest naval Powers in Europe, after ourselves, in the terms of this latest limitation of naval armaments.” Captain Eden was speaking at a meeting which as convened by the Lord Mayor of London on behalf of the League of Nations Union and attended by civic representatives from all parts of Britain to consider disarmament. He said that the British delegation could approach the conference with a clear conscience that Britain had, in all fields of armaments, since the war continuously striven to give a lead in disarmament. “ Deliberately, and because of our belief that excessive armaments are not an insurance of world security, but a menace to it, we have urged the nations to a reduction of armaments by the most effective means in our power, by example. Almost alone among the great Powers, we have not increased our expenditure on armaments during the past five years, and we have done even more than this, for our. reductions since the Armistice have been continuous, drastic, and clear for all to see. When our obligations to our own people and when our commitments, solemnly undertaken in the eyes of the world, are recalled it will at once he perceived that we have taken risks, grave risks, in order that our contribution might be effective, striking, and patently sincere. No one will regret these risks if they bring us the fruits we seek.” The British army, said Captain Eden, was little more than a police force, and in no respect was it larger than immediate Imperial duties required. The navy 'had been successfully reduced; first, voluntarily at the end of the war, and then by successive treaties. But the air reductions have been the most drastic of all, for at the end of the war, with an air force second to none, Britain had voluntarily scrapped seveneighths of it, and to-day, despite London’s vulnerability to air attacks, Great Britain ranked only fifth among the world’s air Powers. He hoped that the Disarmament would remove that discrepancy. Britain could do no more alone, and the other nations must do their share: He trusted that when the Disarmament Conference ended they wogld at least have a method by which armaments might be measured and checked, and that thereby the hopes which had so often been expressed would be translated into action. The British Government would enter the conference in no mean spirit, as it was sincerely anxious to contribute by suggestion and action to real progressive reduction because of the vast burden of international armaments, which to-day clogged world progress.