229. Editorial Note
At the conclusion of the Foreign Ministers Conference in Geneva on August 5, 1959, the Foreign Ministers of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union issued a communiqué to the U.N. Secretary-General stating that they had “had a useful exchange of views on disarmament” and after further consultations would inform him of their results. (Department of State Bulletin, August 24, 1959, page 269)
On September 7, the four Foreign Ministers released another communiqué announcing that they had agreed to form a committee to consider [Page 774] disarmament matters, made up of the United States, France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Poland, and Romania. The Ministers stressed in the communiqué that their committee in no way diminished or encroached on the U.N. responsibilities for disarmament and that their consultations would provide a basis for consideration by the United Nations, to which the group planned to report periodically. The committee expected to begin its work early in 1960 at Geneva. The text of the September 7 communiqué is in Documents on Disarmament, 1945–1959, pages 1441–1443.