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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Issues of disarmament in British defence and foreign policy 1918-1925. Silverlock, Gerard Anthony The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 11. Oct. 2021 ISSUES OF DISARMAMENT IN BRITISH DEFENCE AND FOREIGN POLICY 1918-1925. GERARD ANTHONY SILVERLOCK - KING'S COLLEGE LONDON. Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D., August 2000. (vt) ABSTRACT This thesis provides, for the first time, a detailed examination of the factors affecting British disarmament policy in the period 1918-25 and the inter- action of that policy with negotiations for multi-lateral disarmament at the League of Nations. It considers the issues of the arms traffic, the private manufacture of armaments, chemical warfare, naval disannament in the period 19 18-24, the problems of land and air disarmament, the Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the Geneva Protocol of 1924-25. Disarmament is defined as the limitation and control of armaments by international agreement. It should be understood in terms of aims and process, not simply in terms of product, of crude figures for the reduction of military, naval and air armaments. The pursuit of disarmament, therefore, would have required British Governments to reveal a commitment to the international control and limitation of armaments as a foreign policy objective. International tensions in the period following the Great War, the French obsession with security and the USA's failure to approve the Versailles Treaty were serious obstacles to disarmament. In this thesis it is argued, however, that few British decision-makers understood the disarmament problem and that there was insufficient commitment to the process of international negotiation through the League. Although there were influential personalities within the British Government who wanted to see a reduction in Britain's expenditure on the Fighting Services, successive Governments failed to integrate the national and international components of the disarmament question. It is also argued that inappropriate decisions by the League itseW played a significant part in the failure of initiatives to extend the scope of naval disarmament and to achieve land and air disarmament. CONTENTS Acknowledgements 1. Introduction S -31 2. The Arms Traffic S .5 3. The Private Manufacture of Arms £6 4. The Problem of Chemical Warfare 75 - 5. Naval Disarmament 19 18-22 - /6 6. Naval Disarmament 1922-24 1.3 - i9 # 7. The Problem of Land and Air Disarmament 19 S - 23j 8. The Draft Treaty of Mutual Guarantee 1922-24 22-23° 9. The Geneva Protocol - 10. Conclusion - 31i- Appendices: I. Draft Convention for the Extension of the Washington Naval Treaty to the Non-Signatory Powers of the League of Nations, July 1922 II. Text of the Treaty of Mutual Assistance, 1923 1111. The Draft Treaty of Mutual Guarantee, 1922 IV. Draft Convention of Mutual Assistance, 1923 V. Brief Biographical Notes Bibliography 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to the copyright holders and also to the Birmingham University Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Churchill College, Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, the House of Lords Record Office, the League of Nations Archive, the Liddell Hart Archive, the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Air Force Museum, for permission to examine and, where appropriate, to quote from the papers listed in the bibliography. Documents in the Public Record Office and all other material under Crown copyright are cited by permission of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office. The staff at all these archives have been unfailingly helpfiul and courteous. My special thanks are due to Professor Michael Dockrill for his consistently serious and constructive advice while I was preparing this thesis: I could not have asked for a better supervisor. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to Dr. Dick Richardson who was my second supervisor until his tragic death in 1997. He had a deep knowledge of British disarmament policy and enormous enthusiasm for its study. Gerard Anthony Silverlock. 4 Chapter 1 - Introduction Historians of British defence and foreign policy between the two world wars have identified several important themes: the relationship between disarmament and security, the differing ambitions of revisionist and non- revisionist States, the tensions between so-called idealist and realist decision- makers, and the influence of public opinion on policy making. These themes are relevant to this study which examines the factors affecting British disarmament policy in the period 19 18-25 and the inter-action of that policy with League of Nations' negotiations for multilateral disarmament. Such a study is necessary because there is a wide gap in the literature covering disarmament during these years, except for the Washington Conference of 192 1-22. Until now there has been no attempt to provide an integrated study of the arms traflic, the private manufacture of arms, chemical warfare, the attempt to extend the principles of the Washington Conference to non-signatoty Powers, and schemes initiated at the League of Nations to achieve land and air disarmament. The most significant of the older studies of disarmament which deal with this period are those by Chaput, Madariaga and Wheeler-Bennett.' Chaput and Wheeler-Bennett both provided useful surveys of the action taken to reduce armaments between 1918 and 1925 but their work was based on the very limited evidence then available and they both eschewed value judgements. These observations also apply to the study of the security problem in the period 19 17- 'Chaput, R.A. Disarmament in British Foreign Policy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1935); Madariaga, S. de Disarmament (Washington: Kennikat Press, 1929); Wheeler-Bennett, J.W. Information on the Reduction of Armaments (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925) 5 1926 which Wheeler-Bennett produced with Langermann. 2 Salvador de Madariaga was Director of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations Secretariat from 1922 to 1927 and his study was infonned by his experience of the efforts made at Geneva to achieve disarmament. It combined analysis of these efforts with a passionate appeal for a re-organization of the world community on the basis of a universal League of Nations. He argued that the principal reason for the slow pace of disarmament was the USA's refusal to join the League. The negative attitude of British Governments to disarmament initiatives at Geneva also merited criticism, however, and he considered that Britain's record there would have been abysmal had it not been for the efforts of Robert Cecil, Lord Privy Seal in Baldwin's short-lived Conservative Administration of 1923. During the last twenty years there have been three important studies covering British disarmament policy in the 1920s. 4 Shomey's thesis examined the period from 1916 to 1931 and attached considerable importance to the role of public opinion. He argued that the attitudes of the British people in the inter-war years were essentially pacific and that during the period 19 19-23, the Treasuiy successfully exerted pressure in favour of arms reduction, a policy which had 'the wholehearted support of the Press, Parliament and public opinion'. 5 He concluded that in the three years following the end of the Great War of 1914-18, 2Wheeler-Bennett, J.W. and Langermann, F.E. Information on the Problem of Security (19 17-1926) (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927) 3Madariaga, op.cit.. p.304 4Shorney, D.J. 'Britain and Disarmament 1916-1931', Durham University, Ph.D., 1980; Richardson, D. The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy in the 1920s (London: Pinter, 1989); Kitching, C.J. Britain and the Problem of International Disarmament 19 19-1934 (London: Routledge, 1999) 5Shorney, op.cit., p.4 6 arms limitation was an important objective of British foreign policy but thereafter 'Britain did more to obstruct than promote international disarmament'.6 This assessment of British disarmament policy in the second half of the 1920s is largely supported by Richardson's highly critical analysis of Baldwin's second Conservative Government: With the exception of the National government of 1931-5, it is difficult to find a more incompetent handling of disarmament policy by a British government in the twentieth century.7 Kitching's study covered the period from 1919 to