User:Douglian30/sandbox/Litvinov disarmament

Proponent of disarmament
Litvinov supported disarmament, actively attending the Disarmament Preparatory Commission from 30 November 1927 until it was replaced by the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. Initially he advocated total disarmament. French politician Joseph Paul-Boncour criticised such proposals:

"Supposing you had total disarmament; if there was no international organisation taking charge of security, if you had no international force to ensure the maintenance of this security, if you had no international law such as we are endeavouring to lay down here, a powerful and populous nation would always have the power when it wished to do so on a small nation equally disarmed, less populous and less well equipped to resist an attack which might be made upon it."

Litvinov’s answer was:

"Would small nations be less insecure after their powerful neighbours who have disarmed than they are now when, in addition to economic, financial, territorial and other superiorities possessed by the great powers, the latter also enjoy the immense advantage of greater armaments."

Litvinov’s proposals won him favourable publicity in radical circles in Western countries that were eager for disarmament and impatient at the Commission's slow progress. The national joint Council of the Labour Party, the Parliamentary Labour Party and the TUC passed a resolution expressing their sense of the great importance of proposals for general-and-simultaneous disarmament submitted by the Soviet delegation at the Commission in Geneva on 30 November 1927.

Litvinov favoured Soviet participation in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which pledged signatories to the elimination of the use of war as a tool of foreign police, a position opposite to that of his nominal superior Chicherin. Litvinov, who was frustrated by the failure of the Kellogg-Briand Pact signatories to ratify the treaty, proposed the Litvinov Protocol, in which signatories formally proclaimed themselves in mutual compliance with the pact's goals. The protocol was signed in Moscow in February 1929 by the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Latvia, and Estonia, and later by several other countries.