§ Mr. PONSONBYasked the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs what are the grounds for the amendment put forward by the British delegation to the present Arms Traffic Conference at Geneva to the draft Convention for the Control of the International Traffic. in Arms, now under consideration, which would exclude from its operation all ships of war, including submarines, and all aircraft, even though exclusively designed for purposes of war?
§ Mr. A. CHAMBERLAINCompressed within the limits of an answer to a question, the grounds underlying the instructions of the British delegate on this point are as follow: The object of the draft Convention is to institute a general supervision of the trade in armaments by giving it, through the medium of a licensing system, the fulle4,it possible, publicity. That condition already exists in the case of warships, the construction. movements and ownership of which are public property While, therefore, no increase of publicity would be gained by the application of the licensing system to warships, the execution of the provisions relating to search in transit, which is an adjunct to that system, would lead to serious inconvenience. As regards aircraft, experience has shown that it is impossible to formulate any satisfactory definition of military as opposed to civil aircraft, and it was feared that the, application of the convention to aircraft designed exclusively for war would only lead to difficulties without achieving any useful result.