national policy. The pact included no provisions for insuring compliance with its obligations, and many signatories attached sweeping qualifications or unilateral interpretations, which made the agreement meaningless.

In 1932, after 7 years of preparation, a general disarmament conference was held under the auspices of the League of Nations. A wide variety of measures to limit armed forces, weapons, and expenditures was proposed, including a French proposal for an international police force under the League, a Soviet proposal for general and complete disarmament, and a U.S. plan to reduce forces and to abolish chemical warfare, tanks, bombers, and heavy artillery. No agreement was achieved. Germany demanded the right to rearm unless other nations disarmed to her level, and after Hitler came to power, Germany left the conference and the League. Sporadic sessions of the conference continued until 1937, when it dissolved in deadlock.

New levels of violence and devastation were reached in World War II. Even before its close, the nations fighting the Axis powers began a new effort to prevent war through a system of collective security. The U.N. Charter envisaged international forces under the Security Council to keep the peace. "Armed forces, assistance, and facilities" were to be contributed by all U.N. members. Unlike the Covenant of the League, the Charter gave disarmament no immediate priority; the five great powers would maintain their armaments, policing the disarmament of Germany and Japan and maintaining the peace until the United Nations had developed its own effective military forces. Under Article 11 the General Assembly was "to consider the general principles of cooperation in the maintenance of international peace and security, including the principles governing disarmament and the regulation of armaments," and make recommendations to the Security Council. Article 47 provided that the Military Staff Committee would advise the Security Council on "the regulation of armaments and possible disarmament." Only in these two articles does the word "disarmament" occur.

The Charter of the United Nations was signed at San Francisco on June 26, 1945; on August 6, a new weapon exploded over Hiroshima. Its stupendous power, shattering old concepts of war and weaponry, imposed new urgencies and demanded new perspectives on international efforts to control armaments.

The first American proposal for the control of nuclear weapons recognized that this new force involved the interests of the entire world community. In 1946 the U.S. Representative to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Baruch, presented a U.S. plan that called for placing all the atomic resources of the world under the

ownership or control of an independent international authority. It would have exclusive authority over all the stages of nuclear production, from mining to manufacture, and over the eventual destruction of all nuclear weapons. If the plan were adopted, the United States, the only nuclear power, would give up its atomic arsenal. All nations would submit to inspection by the international authority. If violations called for action by the Security Council, the veto could not be exercised. The plan was to be carried out in stages; the control system was to be in effective operation before the nuclear weapons were removed from the U.S. arsenal.

Although the plan was endorsed by a large majority of U.N. members, the Soviet Union objected to the ownership, staging, and enforcement provisions. Soviet counterproposals left nuclear activities under the control of national governments. The international authority would be empowered only to conduct periodic inspection of declared nuclear facilities. The United States and most other nations considered the Soviet plan's verification provisions altogether inadequate, and negotiations became deadlocked.

Meanwhile, the development of technology brought new dangers and complexities. In September 1949 President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had detonated a nuclear device. In 1952 the United States exploded the first hydrogen device. The first atomic bomb had had the power of 15,000 tons of TNT-15 kilotons. The destructive power of the new weapons was measured in megatons, the equivalent of millions of tons of TNT. In 1953 the Soviet Union announced that they too had exploded a hydrogen bomb. Rivalry in nuclear weapons was paralleled by rivalry in the development of delivery systems.

Among earlier efforts of the nuclear era to control armaments were broad, inclusive proposals, including (by 1959) proposals for "General and Complete Disarmament," with carefully interlocked stages for reducing or eliminating weapons and armed forces, and with precisely stipulated timing to assure that the process of disarming would not leave any nation's security weakened. This exacting requirement for establishing the pace and order of reductions and assuring their equitable impact put great difficulties in the way of agreements. Each nation defined its security needs differently; each possessed differing arrays of weapons and armed forces designed to defend its particular interests. Disparities and differences were accompanied by strong ideological conflicts that intensified wariness and suspicion. And the obstacle of verification stubbornly persisted. The General Assembly's sessions devoted increasing attention to disarmament issues, and the nonnuclear powers demonstrated heightened concern as the spread of nuclear technology and the

continued testing of weapons sharpened world awareness of the implications of nuclear warfare. Successive subsidiary bodies were created as forums for arms control negotiations. The U.N. Disarmament Commission, created in 1952, operated at first chiefly through a Subcommittee of Five-the United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, and the Soviet Union. As debates continued without agreement, membership in disarmament bodies was broadened and efforts were made to blunt the sharpness of East-West division by the participation of nonaligned, nonnuclear nations. The Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC), which began meeting in 1962, became the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament (CCD) in 1969, when its membership was enlarged. The ENDC and the CCD played important roles in achieving the multinational agreements that finally emerged. The Committee on Disarmament (CD), a still larger forum comprising 40 member states, was established in 1978 and began negotiations in 1979. France was a member of both the ENDC and the CCD but had never taken its seat in either. It is an active participant in CD meetings. China has also been an active participant since January 1980.

The creation of such active organizations for multilateral negotiations marked a step forward; so did the convening of special meetings with the participation of experts to deal with particular issues, such as the Geneva Conference on the Discontinuance of Nuclear Tests. The broad continuing effort was supported by active diplomatic exchanges and high-level meetings among the nuclear powers. The special responsibility of the major nuclear powers was subsequently manifested in the bilateral Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between the United States and the Soviet Union that began in 1969.

By the middle of the 1950s, past production of nuclear materials could no longer be reliably accounted for, and control systems could not assure that none had been diverted to clandestine weapons manufacture or illegal stockpiles. A point of no return seemed to have been passed. As negotiations and debate continued, emphasis thus shifted gradually from programs of comprehensive disarmament to more limited measures. This brought a new flexibility and pragmatism into negotiations and, while general and complete disarmament remained a goal, willingness to consider partial solutions of limited scope helped to make solid step-by-step progress possible.

Moreover, advanced technology brought qualitative and quantitative changes in weaponry that radically altered concepts of national security and supplied a compelling incentive for pursuing arms control agreements. In the past it was the generally accepted assumption that more armed strength equaled more security. But this

equation is no longer valid for the United States and the Soviet Union, which possess arsenals able to destroy the other many times over. More armaments do not guarantee more security. They may in fact have an opposite effect, creating new dangers by causing a potential adversary to overreact in his own weapons program-in response to what he perceives as a threat to his own security. The continuing arms race also increases the possibility of an accident.

Arms control is no longer an intermittent enterprise. It has become a central and continuing concern of governments and an integral aspect of foreign policy and national security. Thus the United States-the first government to do so-established a separate agency in 1961 to deal with disarmament issues. The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) is charged with formulating, coordinating, and carrying out arms control policies; for conducting and coordinating research; for preparation and management of U.S. participation in negotiations; and for public dissemination of information about arms control.

Some of the agreements printed here have been signed by almost all the world's nations. Others have been negotiated among the chief nuclear powers, who bear the greatest responsibility for averting conflict that would tragically affect nations and peoples everywhere. Some of the treaties are essentially "nonarmament" agreements, designed to keep free of conflict and nuclear weaponry the environments that science has made newly accessible and significant, and whose resources must be preserved for all-for example, outer space or the seabed-or geographic regions where nuclear weapons have not been introduced-Antarctica and Latin America. Some agreements reflect a growing concern with the need to prevent a war that might occur through accident, unauthorized or lawless action, human error, or mechanical failure. And some reflect a conscious decision by the major nuclear powers to limit their own strategic offensive and defensive weapons.

Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare

At the end of World War I, the victorious Allies decided to reaffirm in the Versailles treaty (1919) the prewar prohibition of the use of poisonous gases (see Introduction) and to forbid Germany to manufacture or import them. Similar provisions were included in the peace treaties with Austria, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

Drawing upon the language of these peace treaties, the United States at the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1922-took the initiative of introducing a similar provision into a treaty on submarines and noxious gases. The U.S. Senate gave its advice and consent to ratification of this treaty without a dissenting vote. It never entered into force, however, since French ratification was necessary, and France objected to the submarine provisions.

At the 1925 Geneva Conference for the Supervision of the International Traffic in Arms, the United States similarly took the initiative of seeking to prohibit the export of gases for use in war. At French suggestion, it was decided to draw up a protocol on non-use of poisonous gas; and at the suggestion of Poland, the prohibition was extended to bacteriological weapons. Signed on June 17, 1925, the Geneva Protocol thus restated the prohibition previously laid down by the Versailles and Washington treaties and added a ban on bacteriological warfare.

Before World War II the protocol was ratified by many countries, including all the great powers except the United States and Japan. When they ratified or acceded to the protocol, some nationsincluding the United Kingdom, France, and the U.S.S.R.-declared that it would cease to be binding on them if their enemies, or the allies of their enemies, failed to respect the prohibitions of the protocol. Although Italy was a party to the protocol, it used poison gas in the Ethiopian war. On the other hand, the protocol was generally observed in World War II. Referring to reports that the Axis powers were considering the use of gas, President Roosevelt said on June 8, 1943:

Use of such weapons has been outlawed by the general opinion of civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope that we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circumstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.