p The Disarmament Conference resumed in May 1934 However, after Germany had declared back on October 14, 1933, that she would no longer attend the conference and set about feverishly rearming herself, the efforts to draw up a convention on arms limitation turned out to have been finally wrecked. "The conference on disarmament”, Lloyd George wrote, "will soon be put from hospital bed to death bed".^^103^^

p Speaking at a meeting of the General Commission of the Disarmament Conference on May 29, Litvinov suggested that the conference might look for some other guarantees of peace (in addition to disarmament). The People’s Commissar pointed out in that connection the possibility of sanctions being applied against peace breakers as well as of Furopean and regional pacts on mutual aid in action against aggression. He went on to set out a proposal by the Soviet government to transform the Disarmament Conference into a standing Peace Conference which would be averting the outbreak of war, seeing to the security of all nations and universal peace, working out, amplifying and improving the methods of promoting security and responding in good time to the warnings about a war danger and to the appeals for aid to the nations in danger and " lending well-timed possible assistance to them, whether moral, economic, financial or of any other kind".^^104^^

p Objecting to the Soviet proposal, the British Foreign Secretary John Simon declared that Britain did not want the Disarmament conference transformed into a security conference. The Soviet proposal was, however, seconded by France and a number of other slates. On June 8, it was decided to refer it to the governments of all nations.

p In that connection the People’s Commissariat for Foreign 48 Affairs sent a letter to the Soviet Ambassador in the United States giving a detailed motivation of the Soviet proposal as well as the draft statute of a standing Peace Conference. The Ambassador was instructed to explain to the Americans the aims the Soviet government pursued by its proposal. The letter stressed, in particular, that since with the disarmament conference adjourned, there was no more ground for co-operation between the members of the League of Nations and the U.S. in matters of peace keeping, the standing Peace Conference would again "create the possibility for such permanent co-operation. ..” It goes without saying, the letter said, that in the face of an absolutely negative U.S. attitude to the whole idea, the Soviet Union would hardly do as much as table its draft in the League of Nations, "because America’s co-operation is one of the main objects pursued by us".^^105^^

p On receiving this letter, the Soviet Charge d’Affaires B. Y. Skvirsky talked the matter over with U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull who declared that "he cannot bind himself by a definite position for or against the draft" explaining this by saying that the U.S. was careful about the possibility of being involved in an international political or- ganisation.^^106^^ Hull’s answer, in fact, meant that the U.S. rejected the Soviet proposal. It was impossible under the circumstances to bring it to fruition.

Churchill wrote, regarding the role the U.S. could have played in safeguarding peace, that "if the influence of the United States had been exerted it might have galvanised the French and British politicians into action. The League of Nations, battered though it had been, was still an august instrument which would have invested any challenge to the new Hitler war menace with the sanction of international law. Under the strain the Americans merely shrugged their shoulders."^^107^^ The United States, joining Britain and France in abetting aggression, had made impossible a rallying of the forces which could have barred the way to aggression.