ARMS REDUCTION

Southland Times, Issue 22201, 19 December 1933, Page 5

ARMS REDUCTION

BRITAIN’S EFFORTS

DIVERGENT POINTS OF VIEW

FRANCE AND GERMANY

(British Official Wireless.) Rugby, December 16. The Disarmament Conference will continue to engage the closest attention of British Ministers during the next few days. The British Government’s continued efforts to end the deadlock were referred to in a speech by Sir John Simon at Chester. He said the withdrawal of Germany from Geneva had added greatly both to the complications and anxieties of the foreign situation in the last month, and the executive committee of the Disarmament Conference had resolved that the work of the conference would at this stage best be assisted by parallel and supplementary efforts between the various States with the full use of diplomatic machinery. The British Foreign Office had been at work ever since in accordance with the terms of that decision. The object was not to make an isolated pronouncement or produce a noble gesture. The object was to get, if possible, an agreement between the greater number of States.

No government could by its own single declaration produce a solution of the disarmament problem. Britain had gone a long way in reducing armaments, and he often wondered if her own isolated action really made disarmament easier to-day. Again no machinery could, by itself, alter the fundamental difficulties of the situation. The gravest and most stubborn of those difficulties, at any rate so far as Europe was concerned, consisted in the divergent points of view of France and Germany. The French demand was for security and Germany’s demand was for equality.. The reconciliation of those two points of view had been the greatest difficulty since the conference began.