Again, Disarmament

Nine men let themselves down rather hopelessly into nine leather chairs around a table at the State Department. One was a Secretary of State with two assistants. One was a Secretary of War with one assistant. One was a Secretary of the Navy with two assistants. Into the ninth chair slid the slight frame of Hugh Gibson, Ambassador to Belgium and his country's most inveterate limitation-of-arms conferee.

The nine were sitting to complete a U.S. program for the preparatory conference on the limitation of armaments to meet in Geneva April 15. Thither Mr. Gibson will lead a U.S. delegation, hoping for much, expecting nothing.

The preparatory conference is to deal with land armaments, beginning with Russia's proposition for an unarmed world, descending toward practicability. In reduction of land forces the U.S. has no interest, leaving that question to Europe. Still it could not go to a disarmament conference without a disarmament program, no matter how negative, so one was prepared last week.

If Mr. Gibson was downcast, his pleasant homely face, with its wide humorous mouth succeeded in diplomatically concealing his feelings. He has been attending arms conferences for the last four years. First it was the 1925 "Traffic-in-Arms" conference, then the 1926-27 preparatory arms commission and finally the ill-starred 1927 conference on naval armaments, of which he was chairman. He has heard all the polite haggling of open and closed diplomacy. He has seen admirals and generals mix a sour brew of national honor, strategy and armament statistics. And he sums his observations thus:

"Disarmament has become a problem of hogs, fogs and bogs."

A Californian by birth, a Frenchman by education, a cosmopolite by diplomatic service, Mr. Gibson was last week the guest of President Hoover at the White House. For six months after the war he was on duty with Mr. Hoover in European relief work.

The Gibson career began at the foot of the foreign service ladder, at Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1908. It took him ten years to reach Paris. Woodrow Wilson in 1919 made him U.S. Minister to Poland. Calvin Coolidge transferred his ministerial duties to Switzerland and finally, in 1927, elevated him to the rank of U.S. Ambassador at Brussels.

The failure to bring about an agreement on naval arms with Great Britain at Geneva in 1927 may or may not be laid at Mr. Gibson's door. In Foreign Affairs, for April, John William Davis, onetime (1918-1921) Ambassador to the Court of St. James's undertook to explain this diplomatic breakdown, to minimize Anglo-American differences, to suggest a policy under which naval limitations could be accomplished. Attracting wide attention in Washington, Mr. Davis wrote :

"... The three-power disarmament conference failed because the ground had not been prepared. . . . The cardinal weakness of that conference was that questions of naval strategy were always to the fore and emphasis on strategy always deflects policy. ... It is policy which ought first to be determined. ... If indications are given from responsible sources that in the event of constabulary action against a [Kellogg-Briand] covenant-breaking state, the navies of the two countries will act together, one area of possible conflict is greatly reduced."

Mr. Davis called for "a frank declaration by the U.S. of its willingness to accept the implications and responsibilities'' embodied in its various anti-war treaties.

That, he thought, "would shrink the whole naval controversy to its true proportions" and "would reduce the probability of a collision between the navies of the U.S. and Great Britain to the vanishing point."

The U.S., not in the mood for making such declarations is waiting for Great Britain to move next on the naval question.