500.A15A4 Steering Committee/491: Telegram
The Minister in Switzerland (Wilson) to the Secretary of State
[Received 7 p.m.]
1071. The Third Commission was set up by the Assembly this morning, the Hungarian delegate declaring that on account of the attitude of other powers towards equality of treatment his delegation would abstain from attending meetings.
A talk with Viénot18 later gives me some further light on the French attitude in disarmament.
Viénot said that his delegation would of course attend the Third Commission but that if he spoke at all in the name of France it would [Page 17] be merely to reserve his views for the Bureau which organ was more representative of the great armed powers. He anticipates that the Bureau will meet in the next few days.
Requesting me to regard the information as confidential he said that at the Bureau the French representative would state that it [was] believed that the time was ripe for a “reexamination” of the questions of budgetary publicity, control of the manufacture of and traffic in arms and limitations of air forces. The first two the French delegation believed could be undertaken by a second reading [of the] draft conventions already existing. As for the third, they had not worked out the final details of what they hoped to propose.
The French delegation would not push the other task to an immediate and decisive answer but would propose a second meeting of the Bureau [after a] certain delay to enable the delegates to consult with their governments. Whether this second meeting should take place before or after the Locarno conversations would be a point to be determined in the Bureau.
Following the lines of your 511, September 28, 6 p.m., I spoke of the great interest of the United States in seeing these conventions brought into being but reminded him of the wide divergence of view between the British and French delegations in the last discussions and added that I thought it would be unhappy to see these divergences in public in the present situation. I gained the impression from Viénot that he knew even less about the British attitude than I. He said the French were deeply concerned, that the essential first step was the control of the production of armaments. Limitation might follow but he did not believe that limitation could precede or be simultaneous with the control of production. He admitted that the wiser procedure would be for the French Government to work with the British after the first Bureau meeting and urge them to examine how far they could revise their attitude.
Viénot [said that] in its initiative the French was hoping to have not only the approval of the United States but the same vigorous support from that country that had characterized the debates in the last meetings. I replied that my Government was as anxious now as then to see these conventions realized but stated that it seemed to me that the crux of success for a second [reading] in the absence of Germany lay in the British and French ironing out the differences.
In replying as I did to Viénot I tried to give him the impression that while we earnestly desired success and would aid enthusiastically if there were any hope, we would be reluctant to waste effort on a gesture condemned to failure at the start.
- Pierre Viénot, French Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; delegate (substitute) to the League of Nations Assembly, September 21–October 10, 1936.↩