Global Disarmament Plan 'Unworkable'

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31109, 12 July 1966, Page 17

Global Disarmament Plan 'Unworkable '

f.V.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

WASHINGTON, July 11.

The United States plan for eventual global disarmament is unworkable and possibly dangerous, a research panel said in a report to the United States Disarmament Agency made public last night.

The 129-page study says that the scrapping of national armed forces in favour of a powerful United Nations peace force, as envisioned in the final stage of the United States blueprint, does not provide adequate alternative machinery to protect national interests in a troubled world. The two-year study of the United States plan for general and complete disarmament was carried out by a sevenman panel of experts at Johns Hopkins University's Washington centre of foreign policy research under a contract with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The United States proposal was presented to the continuing 17-nation disarmament meeting in Geneva in 1962, partly as a propaganda counter to the Russians’ widely publicised proposition for universal disarmament.

Under the United States plan, balanced arms reduction would proceed by stages. By the final phase. Stage HI, means for just and peaceful settlement of all international disputes would be worked out and the United Nations force would be too strong to be challenged by national forces. But a comment by one of the panelists declared: “If the process of disarm-

Ing in stages promoted a climate in which existing sources of tension and conflict would be eased, then eventually the world might approach a consensus on fundamental principles and values such as would ultimately enable the establishment of the irresistible peace force suggested. "However, the dawn of that day is far distant.”