-6-
 
     Mr. Chamberlain and Lord Halifax both laughed. The
 
former said that he was struck by what I said, and that he
 
believed with me that the way to attack the disarmament  
 
problem, when the moment came was from the qualitative 
 
approach, rather than from the quantitative approach.
     
     He then said "What exactly is your proposal?
 
     I replied that,  as I had already made very clear, I
 
had no proposal. I said I was merely exchaging views in 
 
order to try and get as clear a knowledge as I possibly 
 
could of his point of view and that of his Government. 
 
The main issue I thought was security. I could conceive 
 
of a situation where the great powers of Europe could 
 
agree upon a practical basis for actual and progressive 
 
disarmament. It would possibly have to envisage the 
 
control by some international commission, or commissions, of 
 
the actual destruction of agreed-upon categories of offensive 
 
armaments, and of the factories where they were manu-
 
factured, with full rights of inspection and determination. 
 
It might further perhaps include the constitution, of a 
 
regional aviation police-force, divided, for reasons of 
 
practical expediency, into several units with bases in various 
 
of the smaller neutral European countries. All of this 
 
obviously implied limitation of sovereignty. I stated 
 
that this was a subject upon which I was not authorized to 
 
speak upon which I had no expert knowledge, and-upon which 
 
I consequently did not wish to dwell. And it was of course 
 
a problem which directly concerned the European powers, and 
 
in which the United States very definitely had no direct 
 
part to play. The general thoughts I had expressed were
 
 the result of conversations I had had during recent months
 
                                                    with