178. Editorial Note
According to the minutes of a White House meeting on April 6, 1962, Secretary of State Rusk told President Kennedy that “there was an urgent need to provide the U.S. delegation at Geneva with an outline of our proposed treaty for general and complete disarmament. He noted that the Soviet delegation had already tabled a draft treaty and that there was considerable pressure on our delegation to begin a detailed discussion of the Soviet document.” The President asked “why it was that we were not further along with the treaty draft at this point since we presumably had been working on it for the past several months.” William Foster, Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, replied that “the most basic substantive issue to be resolved was the manner in which reductions of armaments and limitations on production could be controlled.” The President asked that a small interagency task force be formed to prepare a final draft of the treaty. For text of the minutes, see Foreign Relations, 1961–1963, volume VII, pages 422–425.