History of Global Arms Transfer, 5 (2018), pp. 19-36

Convertibility and the Militaristic
Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament
Discourses, 1919-1945†
By S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI*
The interwar years mark the emergence of arms control both as a major foreign
policy issue and also as a major topic of public and private debate and discussionin Europe and elsewhere. This paper examines two prominent, yet neglected,
aspects of these discourses. Unearthing and exploring these two aspects points tothe importance of assumptions about the nature and origins of science andtechnology in discourses surrounding arms control, as well as the politicallycontingent nature of many of the concepts used therein. The first aspect, thepossibility of the convertibility of civilian science and technology to military use,
was debated and discussed in relation to a wide range of industries, particularly
aviation. This paper shows that although convertibility was used to support
widely different positions in relation to arms control, arguments for its support
rested on the same shared assumptions about the relationships between civilian
and military technologies. The second aspect was a ‘militaristic perversion’argument which sometimes built upon the first, often by internationalists andpacifists. The natural development of modern science and technology was acivilian one, it was argued, which would lead to beneficial effects including
increasing peace and prosperity and even, in some cases, international integration.
The military application was, on the other hand, a perversion which had twisted
these sciences and technologies into an unnatural and harmful trajectory. This
argument was used most often in support of reduced arms production anddeployment, and for reduced military influence in certain industrial sectors.
The interwar years mark the emergence of arms control both as a major foreign policy issue
and also as a major topic of public and private debate and discussion in Europe andelsewhere. Elected government officials, politicians, diplomats, activists, pressure groups,
and the press participated in discourses that discussed the nature and feasibility of different
forms of arms control, and their relationship to foreign policy, military objectives, andinternational relations more broadly. These disarmament discourses present rich sites forthe investigation of beliefs about science, technology, and modernity. They span bothpublic rhetoric and private policy discussion, and when located within the context ofinternational negotiations they incorporate a range of different political positions andcounterarguments. Moreover, as disarmament has often been an important concern for† A previous version of this article has been presented at a workshop at the Research Institute for the History of
Global Arms Transfer at Meiji University in March 2017. I would like to thank the members of the institute for
their comments on this paper, especially Professors Katsuhiko Yokoi, Kaori Takada, and Tamara Enomoto. In thispaper TNA refers to The National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
* Author Affiliations: Waqar H. Zaidi, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan.

－ 19 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
those creating or enacting foreign policy, for intellectuals thinking about international
relations, and for activists pushing for (or against) greater pacifism or internationalism,
these discourses incorporate ideologically charged positions and rhetoric. These discourses,
then, can lay bare ideological positions and so help us to understand political ideologies
and belief systems, and give us a window to assumptions about (in this case) science,technology, and industry held more widely in society.
This paper examines two prominent, yet neglected, aspects of these discourses. The first,
the possibility of the convertibility of civilian science and technology to military use, waswidely debated and discussed in relation to a wide range of industries, particularly aviation.
Discussions on convertibility incorporated differing understandings of the extent to which
it was possible, reached a variety of conclusions as to its implications for defence policy
and arms control, and were used to support differing, sometimes diametrically opposed,
positions on armaments and arms control. Yet arguments for convertibility everywhererested on the same shared assumptions about the relationships between civilian and militarytechnologies – that it was possible because modern military weapons had their origins incivilian science and technology, and had not yet diverged enough from their civiliancounterparts to make conversion from civilian to military technology impractical. The
second aspect was a ‘militaristic perversion’ argument which sometimes built upon thefirst, often by internationalists and pacifists. The natural development of these sciences andtechnologies was a civilian one, it was argued, which would lead to beneficial effects
including increasing peace and prosperity and even, in some cases, international
integration. The military application was, on the other hand, a perversion which had twisted
these sciences and technologies into an unnatural and harmful trajectory. This argument
was used most often in support of reduced arms production and deployment, and for
reduced military influence in certain industrial sectors.
These aspects of the debates surrounding arms control are largely absent from thegrowing literature on interwar arms control, which has not unpacked notions of science andtechnology alluded to in these debates.1 Yet recent work has demonstrated that the languageof foreign policy can be fruitfully examined in order to unearth widespread conceptual
understandings.2 This paper seeks to do exactly this by building on the cultural histories ofaviation produced by David Edgerton and Brett Holman, and extending their insights byarguing that assumptions about science and technology were central to notions of aerial
convertibility, that convertibility arguments often went hand-in-hand with militaristic
perversion arguments, and that these notions were not peculiar to aviation but werewidespread in relation to other industries.3 This paper places these two sets of arguments
into a longer perspective by tracing them into the Second World War and to the UnitedStates, and through to the early postwar period. Unearthing and exploring these two aspects
points to the importance of understandings and assumptions about the nature and origins ofscience and technology in discourses surrounding arms control, as well as the politicallycontingent nature of many of the concepts used therein.
1 On arms control broadly, Ahmann, Birke, and Howard, The Quest for Stability; Webster, ‘From Versailles to
Geneva’. On British policy, Richardson, The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy; Kitching, Britain and the
Problem of International Disarmament; McKercher (ed.), Arms Limitation and Disarmament. On chemical
weapons, Spiers, Chemical Warfare. On French policy, Vaïsse, Sécurité D’abord; Jackson, ‘France and the
Problems of Security’. On naval arms control, Hall, Britain, America and Arms Control; Kaufman, Arms Control
During the Pre-Nuclear Age; Goldman, Sunken Treaties; Fanning, Peace and Disarmament.
2 Doty, ‘Aporia’; Milliken, ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations’; Larsen, Foreign Policy andDiscourse Analysis.
3 Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, p. 41; Holman, ‘The Shadow of the Airliner’.

－ 20 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945

I Aerial Convertibility
Although discussion on the military uses of aviation predated the First World War, thenotion that existing civilian aircraft and associated facilities could easily be converted tomilitary use emerged in Britain at the end of the war in relation to state planning forpostwar aviation. Citing the apparent success of military aviation during the war, theconvertibility argument was used in support for calls for an expanded British air force andfunding for British civil aviation. One government committee, charged ostensibly withsuggesting policies for civil aviation after the war, suggested that the future development ofcivilian aircraft keep military uses in mind, even if this reduced commercial profitability.4
In late 1918 Chief of the Air Staff Brigadier-General Frederick Sykes, in his so-called
Sykes Memorandum on the future of British aviation recommended high subsidies for the
British commercial aviation sector due to its usefulness for British military aviation. As
well as the development of an extensive network of air routes and aerodromes, herecommended that British airliners be equipped so that that they could be converted at short
notice into bombers.5 Supporters of a strong British air force continued to argue for strong
state support for civilian aviation in the 1920s and 1930s because civilian aviation offered,in the words of Air Commodore R.H. Clark-Hall lecturing at the Royal United Service
Institution in 1924, a ‘reserve’ for military aviation.6 Underlying much of this rhetoric was
the notion that civilian and military aviation were fundamentally the same, or derived fromthe same root. For Clark-Hall, for example, civil and military aviation were ‘two branches’of one aviation. He ended his 1924 lecture by arguing that this aviation would develop in a
unified way through three phases, and briefly outlined how five other similar ‘inventions’,
the railway, the steamship, the telephone, the submarine cable, and the motor-car had
passed through a similar three stage development. These technologies were chosen as they
were generally then considered to be of the same type, that is civilian transport andcommunications which had the effect, fundamentally, of increasing the speed ofcommunications. The militaristic aspects of these technologies were not mentioned at all.7
The intimate connection between military and civil aviation was built on the widespreadassumption that military aviation was civilian in origin, though developed along militarylines by the armed forces. This assumption was widely believed and reproduced in writings
on aviation – as in, for example, Walter Raleigh’s 1922 official history of wartime aviation,
which began with a history of the ‘invention’ of aviation and highlighted heroic civilian
inventors as the progenitors of military aviation.8
Civilian aerial entrepreneurs and industrialists also made the reserve argument as part oftheir calls for greater state support for civilian aviation. In 1920 the self-styled ‘First Air
Member of Parliament’ Noel Pemberton-Billing called for further funding of an ‘efficientcommercial air service’ on the basis that this would give Britain ‘an enormous reserve tocall upon at any time’. Speaking in Parliament, Pemberton-Billing called not only for
greater subsidies for the civilian aircraft industry, but also for suggested greater state
regulation which would ensure the design and production of civilian aircraft that could be
4 Holman, ‘The Shadow of the Airliner’.
5 Sykes, ‘Memorandum by the Chief of the Air Staff’. See also, Sykes, Aviation in Peace and War, pp. 102-4.
6 Clark-Hall, ‘The Value of Civil Aviation as a Reserve’.
7 Ibid.
8 Raleigh, The War in the Air, p.122.

－ 21 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI‘transformed into bombing machines at short notice’. 9 Others, such as the aerial
entrepreneur and Member of Parliament Charles Dennistoun Burney argued that the stateshould fund international commercial aviation instead of military aviation. This would be
both stimulate economic demand whilst at the same time providing a military reserve.10
Christopher Birdwood Thomson, onetime Labour Air Secretary, was one of many whocalled for the inculcation of an ‘air habit’ amongst the public so as to bolster civil aviationand provide a pool of expertise for military aviation.11
The convertibility argument was used in support of increased funding for British aviationin other ways too. In the twenties and thirties it was used to warn of the dangers of German
aviation - most prominently in the writings of air power enthusiast Brigadier General(retired) P.R.C Groves and the newspapers which promoted his views. In lectures andnewspaper and journal articles Groves warned that Germany was developing her civilian
aviation in such a manner that their civilian aircraft could be used for military purposes,
including bombers, if required.12 But he also located this potential for conversion within
the broader natural technical development of large civilian aircraft. His much publicised
1927 report to an Air Transport Co-operation Committee of the League, The Relations
between Civil and Military Aviation, pointed out that: ‘The development of commercial
aviation has called for a constantly increased range of greater reliability, greater weight andcarrying capacity and higher speeds. These are precisely the requirements aimed at in thedevelopment of bombers…The average air liner is a potentially far more efficient bomber
than the air liner of seven years ago’.13 More broadly the fear of a German aerial attack inthe 1930s included the notion that Germany could use commercial aeroplanes as bombers.
One RAF officer, writing in The Spectator in 1935, estimated that Germany had 300‘modern’ civilian aeroplanes with ‘a real military value’, along with a network ofcommercial aerodromes and facilities suitable for military use. The British state, contended
these supporters of air power, needed to invest more civilian and military aviation in turn,or risk quick defeat in a future war.14
Given national and nationalist concerns about aerial power, it is no surprise thatconvertibility became an important component of debates about aerial disarmament. It
cropped up at the post-World War One Paris peace conference during debates on thedisarmament regimes to be imposed on Germany. In 1919 the notion of convertibility wasreadily accepted by both those arguing for and arguing against tight restrictions on German
aviation. One French delegate called for a ban on all German civil aviation for twenty tothirty years. The opposing response, by the U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing,compared abolishing Germany’s civil aviation to depriving her of horses, which could draw
both ploughs and guns. President Wilson pointed out that by the same logic railroads,
which could carry armaments, and merchant ships, which could readily be converted for
war use, should be banned too. The Allied aeronautical commission charged with drawing
up the aerial sections of the Treaty of Versailles concluded that, in addition to restricting
German military aviation, civil aviation needed to be restricted because of its convertibility(‘aeroplanes and airships can be very easily and quickly transformed into weapons of
9 Hansard (Commons), 5th ser., CXXVI, 11 Mar. 1920, col. 1658.
10 Hansard (Commons), 5th ser., CCIII, 17 Mar. 1927, cols. 2248 – 59. See also: Hansard (Commons), 5th ser.,CCXXVI, 7 Mar. 1929, col. 670; and Burney, The World, The Air and the Future.
11 Thomson, Air Facts and Problems, p.58.
12 Groves, Our Future in the Air; Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen, pp. 230, 237; Holman, ‘The Shadow of theAirliner’.
13 Groves, ‘The Relations between Civil and Military Aviation’.
14 P.R. Burchall, ‘Civil Aviation and Bombing’, in The Spectator, 7 June 1935, p. 968.

－ 22 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945war’).15
Opponents of aerial disarmament used the convertibility argument too in the 1920s. The
Air Ministry and air power enthusiasts in Britain cited it as a way of demonstrating that thecomplete abolition of bombers would not prevent bombing, and consequently that any
attempt at such abolition would have to take civil aviation into account as well. This, theargument usually proceeded, was practically difficult and would retard the natural andbeneficial growth of civil aviation. Aerial disarmament, they concluded, was thus notpractically possible. 16 A committee appointed by the League of Nations Preparatory
Commission for the Disarmament Conference to consider the relationship between civilian
and military aviation, for example, reached this conclusion following a series of meetings
in February 1927. The Committee emphasised the importance of the continued
development of civil aviation to international relations which, it noted, ‘when it has reached
its full development, will be one of the most important means of bringing the peoples of
the world nearer together. Distances will be reduced more and more, so that civil aviation,by enabling the different nations to maintain ever-closer mutual relations, will contributelargely towards the maintenance of good international relations and the preservation ofworld peace.’ Yet the committee also believed that civil aviation could be easily converted
to military use. Consequently, rather than aerial disarmament, it suggested each state
manage its aviation sectors in order to reduce convertibility. States needed to segregate
military and civilian aviation as much as possible, so that militaristic ends did notcontaminate the development of civilian aviation. It was also suggested that states propel
the development of their civilian aviation forward so that it diverged, in terms of its
characteristics, from military aviation. Its final report recommended that ‘every effort
should be directed towards differentiating more and more clearly between civil and militaryaviation; in this way, civil machines will become capable of a maximum economic return
and will become less and less useful for military purposes, and the activities of civil
aviation can be developed in full freedom without being subordinated in any way to themilitary requirements of the different countries.’ Concrete proposals included thesuggestions that governments separate their departments dealing with civilian and militaryaviation, that civilian pilots not be required to undergo military training, that governments
not subsidize civil aviation for ‘strategic’ purposes (only for ‘economic and social
purposes’), greater international cooperation in civilian aviation, and that governments‘refrain from prescribing the embodiment of military features in the construction of civil
aviation material’. These points were eventually incorporated into the draft agreement thatwas put before the 1932 Disarmament Conference - the agreement which was brushedaside by the Tardieu Plan and later disarmament proposals.17
The recourse to convertibility arguments by both opponents and supporters of aerial
disarmament continued into the thirties, and were particularly prominent during the 193234 Geneva disarmament conference. Opponents of aerial disarmament, such as the Air
Ministry civil servant J.M. Spaight argued that it would not work because civilian aircraft
were easily convertible to military use. 18 The Air Staff ’s stance during the Geneva
15 Foreign Relations of the United States 1919, IV, (Washington, D.C., 1943), pp. 370-1; Supreme Council, 17Mar. 1919; Carlton, ‘The Problem of Civil Aviation in British Air Disarmament Policy’.
16 For example: TNA, Air Staff Memorandum on Limitation of Air Armament, AIR 5/360, Dec. 1923.
17 League of Nations, Air Commission of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, IX,(Geneva, 1932), pp. 47 – 8, Objective Study on The Internationalisation Of Civil Aviation. On the 1932
conference see, Kitching, Britain and the Geneva Disarmament Conference; Davies, ‘France and the World
Disarmament Conference of 1932-34’.
18 Spaight, An International Air Force, p. 74.

－ 23 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
conference was that civilian aircraft had to be taken into account in comparisons of national
aerial might, and if that was done then Britain was seriously behind even countries such as
France, which had eight times as many civilian airliners.19 Internationalists agreed thatcivilian airliners could be converted to bombers, and consequently suggested that civil
aviation also be controlled by an international organisation such as the League of Nations.
In making these arguments supporters of international control often took up elements ofanti-German rhetoric from the twenties, warning that the Germans had were specificallydeveloping their civilian aeroplanes as a military reserve. 20 Other opponents usedconvertibility arguments in less conventional ways. Industrialist Frederick Handley Page,
for example, argued in a speech in 1933 that international control of civil aviation was notneeded because European civil aircraft could not readily be converted to bombers.
American airliners could, however, and so any scheme for international control in Europe
would increase American might in the air.21
Although widespread, belief in convertibility was not unanimous: a few opponents ofaerial disarmament explicitly argued against it. Major Frederic Robertson, aircorrespondent for the Manchester Guardian, argued at a League of Nations Union
conference on ‘The Problem of the Air’ in 1935 that aviation was, in fact, not a problem.
Nations in the next war were likely to stick to the ‘convention’ of not bombing civilians,
and that anyhow bombing by commercial aircraft was unlikely, for: ‘if a plane is a good
civil machine, it will be a bad bomber...Everybody says it is so easy to convert them. They
are only thinking of putting a few bomb-racks underneath and a bomb-lever; but bombing
is not as easy as all that. It is a very highly technical skilled operation…A lot of these civil
machines could not fly high enough to be at all safe. They would not be manoeuvrable; andthey would not be able to defend themselves against swift fighters.’22

II Scientific and Industrial Convertibility
Convertibility arguments in relation to aviation were sustained in the twenties and thirties
because they could be used effectively by supporters of national aviation, and by bothsupporters and opponents of aerial disarmament. But they were also sustained because they
were used in relation to other armaments and industries, particularly naval and chemicalarmaments. In relation to naval arms convertibility arguments were most prominent during
or in relation to the three prominent naval conferences: Washington 1921-22, Geneva 1927
and London 1930. During these conferences American arguments for a larger American
navy in relation to the British drew on the notion that the larger British merchant marine
provided a reserve which could be readily converted to military fighting ships.
Convertibility arguments were used in the minutiae of negotiation - British insistence, forexample, on restricting the mounting of eight inch guns on small American cruisers becamea crucial sticking point at the 1927 Geneva Conference on naval disarmament. American
resistance to this restriction came to rest on the argument that such cruisers would be only
marginally superior to armed merchant ships.23 The American press carried out a barrage of
19 Meilinger, ‘Disarmament and Airpower’.
20 For example, TNA, Arthur Henderson, Foreign Office Memo to the Disarmament Conference Subcommittee,

Disarmament Conference, AIR 5/1117, 31 Mar. 1931. On international control see, Waqar Zaidi, ‘“Aviation Will
Either Destroy or Save Our Civilization”’; Holman, ‘The Shadow of the Airliner’.
21 Frederick Handley Page, ‘Air Disarmament’ in Flight, 6 April 1933, pp. 327-28.
22 League of Nations Union, The Problem of the Air, p. 18.
23 Carlton, ‘Great Britain and the Coolidge Naval Disarmament Conference’.

－ 24 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945
criticism of British proposals throughout the Conference, some of it based on the notion of
the convertibility of Britain’s merchant navy and its supporting infrastructure such as
coaling stations. Commentators clamoured for this commercial infrastructure to be taken
into account when calculating disarmament levels.24 Opponents of naval disarmament madesimilar claims on the Senate floor and in Senate Committees.25 Bemoaning the collapse of
the Geneva Conference, British supporters of disarmament such as the academic PhilipNoel Baker and political analyst Stephen King-Hall pointed out that the British government
should have realised that military naval disarmament was in its best interest because suchdisarmament would have left it with the biggest potential military navy in the world – its
own merchant fleet, ready to be improvised into ‘battle fleet of armed liners capable ofdealing with the combined fleets of Europe, if not of the world!’26
Claims for convertibility in relation to chemical weapons arose, like for aviation, at theend of the First World War. Although the concept was used in discussions relating toGerman disarmament, its underlying function was to make the case for greater British state
investment in the chemicals industry. A British Ministry of Munitions inspection of German
factories in 1919 concluded that so many German civilian chemical factories could be orindeed had been converted to military use that German chemical disarmament was notpossible without also abolishing several key chemicals industries, including her dye
industry. This was, the inspection concluded, not possible, and so the only remedy for
Britain was the ‘establishment of a strong dye and fine chemical industry in this country sothat, if necessary, we would be prepared to retaliate-in-kind’. 27 One proponent of
disarmament announced in 1921 that the chemicals industry was ‘the most perfect type of
convertible industry’, and a major task of Allied arms inspectors in 1920 was to ensure thatmilitary chemical factories were converted to civilian use. This belief in chemical gas
convertibility continued through the 1920s and 1930s when it surfaced in discussions
within the League of Nations and within the British government.28 By the end of thetwenties it had come to be closely intertwined with aerial convertibility. Aerial
convertibility was referred to in discussions on chemical weapons, and vice-versa, in orderto further emphasize that convertibility was the norm for these new scientific industries.
Within the aerial discussions at the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament
Conference (1927-1930), for example, quick and easy convertibility of both the commercial
aviation and chemical industries emerged as an unquestioned assumption accepted by all,even as they held differing views on disarmament itself.29
Liberal internationalists were at the forefront of locating convertibility within a broader
context of industry, science, and technology. In their treatises, books, and speeches oninternational relations and disarmament, convertibility emerged not as a peculiar
characteristic of aviation, but rather as a peculiar characteristic of modern scientificindustry. This allowed them to support their wider narratives on the unique destructivenessof modern scientific warfare and its destabilization of contemporary international relations.
24 Edwin James, ‘See American Loss in British Plan of Naval Disarmament’ in New York Times, 12 May 1927;‘America May Insist on 9-Inch Naval Gun’, in New York Times, 2 June 1927.
25 Buckley, ‘The Icarus Factor’. On interwar naval disarmament see also, Hall, Britain, America and Arms
Control; O’Brien, British and American Naval Power, pp. 149-242; Fanning, Peace and Disarmament.
26 Noel Baker, Disarmament and the Coolidge Conference, p. 37.
27 Spiers, ‘Gas Disarmament in the 1920s’.
28 Shuster, German Disarmament after World War I, p. 66. Spiers, ‘Gas Disarmament in the 1920s’.
29 For example during discussions on aerial disarmament at the Preparatory Commission for the Disarmament
Conference, see, Madariaga, Disarmament, p. 193. On reference to aerial convertibility in a work on chemical
weapons see, Fradkin, ‘Chemical Weapons – Its Possibilities and Probabilities’.

－ 25 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
It allowed them to demand far-reaching solutions such as the creation of powerinternational organisations and wide-ranging disarmament which extended into civilian
industries. It also allowed them to claim that disarmament was now a more complex
problem requiring apolitical technical expertise and radical solutions to resolve. 30 The
widely read internationalist overview of international relations, Labour MP Hugh Dalton’s
1928 Towards the Peace of Nations, pointed out that the ‘swift and easy’ convertibility ofcivilian to military aircraft was only part of a much bigger problem. Other prominent
examples of convertibility were merchant ships and chemical factories, but these were also
only part of a deeper pattern of industrial convertibility: ‘In the long run and even, as wasshown during the Great War, in the course of a year or two, almost the whole populationand material resources of a State may be converted from peaceful occupations to purposesof war. For such wholesale conversions, highly industrialised communities possess great
advantages.’31 In the leading scholarly work on disarmament of the 1920s, Disarmament(1926), Noel Baker argued that increasingly those modern scientific technologies thatwould play the most important role in war were precisely those also important in thecivilian sphere. Consequently it was increasingly difficult to differentiate and delineate
between outputs of modern science which could be used for military purposes, and thosewhich could be used for civilian purposes. His three examples were, in order of importance,
aviation, poison gas, and ‘heavy motor-lorries’.32 Noel Baker and fellow internationalist
David Davies believed that it was this modern breaking down of the previously firm
divisions between civilian and military technologies, techniques, sciences and industries
which made disarmament so difficult to negotiate. In a lecture on disarmament at the
Grotius society in 1919 Davies warned that the ‘aggressive powers of a nation do notnecessarily depend on soldiers and warships. If both the latter were abolished, the mostdangerous nation would be the possessor of the largest number of commercial aeroplanes,
the greatest mercantile marine, or the best resources for the production of explosives andpoisonous chemicals.’ 33 Any workable scheme of disarmament would thus, theseinternationalists reasoned, also need to take into consideration related civilian industries.
Perhaps the best known and most systematic exposition of the convertibility argument inrelation to disarmament was that by industrial chemist and chemical weapons expert Victor
Lefebure. In a series of lectures, articles, and books in the twenties and early thirties headvocated a ‘scientific’ approach to disarmament which would both deal with the problems
of modern industrial convertibility and correct for the failings of diplomats and politicians
who, he claimed, were unable to systematically and dispassionately analyse thedisarmament problem. Building on the widespread recognition that nature of modern
warfare now rested on a country’s industrial might, he emphasised the convertibility ofcivilian to military technologies and industries, especially in relation to chemicals andaviation, but then went on to argue for the existence of a ‘conversion lag’ - being the time
taken to convert any particular civilian industry to military use. The existence of this lag,which varied from industry to industry and country to country, he reasoned, meant that theabolition or international control of whole industries and technologies was unnecessary.
Disarmament regulations could instead focus on making conversion of civilian facilities tomilitary armaments as difficult as possible. A scientifically determined mix of measures,
30 On internationalist thinking on science and technology see: Zaidi, ‘Liberal Internationalist Approaches to
Science and Technology’.
31 Dalton, Towards the Peace of Nations, pp. 192-5.
32 Noel Baker, Disarmament, pp. 40, 41, 220-1.
33 Davies, ‘Disarmament’.

－ 26 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945
including supervision of research and development, limitations on technical and scientificpersonnel, and the banning of bombardment, would protect national civilian industries
from immediate misuse by the state for military purposes.34 His work was influential ininternationalist and military policy circles, and was cited as support by both those whowanted disarmament and international control, and those who opposed it. It was also
sometimes cited by those calling for increased expert involvement in international affairs Nature for example referenced Lefebure in its call for scientists to be given a central role
within international disarmament discussions.35

III Militaristic Perversion
The second aspect of disarmament discourses, the notion of militaristic perversion, has its
roots in nineteenth century liberal thought. From the middle of the century onwards liberal
intellectuals had come to posit an opposition between industry and trade on the one hand
and war and militarism on the other. Richard Cobden and others had argued that industrial
and trade policies, and growing industrialisation and international trade, led to international
peace. Militaristic policies, on the other hand, were detrimental to industrial andcommercial development. Central to this understanding was the assumption that modern
science and industry were essentially civilian and peaceful in character, and that militarydevelopments were a perversion external to modern science itself.36 By the early twenties
this Cobdenite thinking had become incorporated into a liberal critique of militaristic
perversion. English economist A.C. Pigou’s 1921 well-known critique of militarism and thecosts of war, The Political Economy of War, for example, counted the militaristic
perversion of civilian land and sea transport as one of the burdens of war, and foretold thataviation too would be ‘twisted’ from its ‘normal development’ as long as governments
continued to ‘exercise control over the design of commercial aircraft’ and ‘have a voice inpreparing air routes and determining the situation of aerodromes.’ In these cases the threat
was that the government would develop civilian aviation such that it could easily beconverted for military use, thus interfering with the ‘free play of economic forces’ andleading to ‘less efficient instruments of communications in normal times’.37 This critique
was thus an attack on the military’s influence in scientific and industrial research anddevelopment, and a call for this development to be directed by civilian technical experts (orthe free market), who, it was argued, were best placed to ensure that industries weredeveloped for the social and economic wealth and well-being of the nation.38
By the late twenties this critique had come to underpin internationalist calls for arms
control and international regulation or ‘control’ of strategic national industries. Noel
Baker’s Disarmament referenced Pigou’s work, and extended its arguments to virtually allof heavy industry: militaristic aims were ‘diverting the normal channel of industrial
development’ - the ‘iron and steel industries, the engineering industry; some chemicalindustries, iron-mining and coal-mining’ as well as ‘big shipyards and aircraft factories’.
These were modern technical and scientific enterprises, and as such then there was also the‘perversion of scientific and inventive genius’, that is scientists and engineers, fromcommercial (‘productive’) to military (‘unproductive’) research and development.
34 Lefebure, Scientific Disarmament.
35 Editorial, ‘A Scientific Approach to Peace’, in Nature, 17 Nov. 1934, pp. 749-51.
36 Howe, ‘Free Trade and Global Order’.
37 Pigou, The Political Economy of War, pp. 9, 10.
38 For more on the militaristic critique see: Edgerton, Warfare State, pp. 2, 12.

－ 27 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
Complete disarmament, he concluded, could only be achieved when all modern industries
and scientific research was shielded from the military.39
This argument became central also in proposals for the international control of civil
aviation in the 1930s. Only international control, it was argued, would separate civil
aviation from the militaristic and nationalistic influences of nations, thus allowing it todevelop along its inherently pure commercial trajectory. Only in this way would the worldreap the fullest rewards of air travel’s internationalist bounty: growing commerce andcontact amongst nations, and the ensuing spread of international peace. Some went further,and argued that the governing international organisation could utilise convertibility itself
by treating its own commercial aerial fleet as a military reserve, to be used if necessary forinternational policing. 40 Internationalists such as Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish
diplomat and League official, based their calls for international control of aviation (and in
his case, also chemicals industries) on the premise that ‘military and naval reasons warp,
distort and even subvert economic laws at every turn’. This militaristic perversion,internationalists argued, had begun in World War One, which whilst accelerating themilitary development of civilian inventions at the same time hindered their naturaldevelopment, which was civilian and peaceful in nature.41 International control, argued
David Davies, was the only practical solution to the problem of modern scientificarmaments, whose roots lay in modern scientific industry. These industries could naturally
be turned to militaristic ends, so the only other solution, too extreme to imagine, would be
to abolish the industries themselves.42
Amongst liberal internationalists the militaristic perversion argument fed off underlying
concerns (real or imagined) about the political power of national militaries, the militaristic
tendencies of government policy-makers and the civil service, the growth in armaments(‘rearmament’), and ultimately growing tensions in European international relations. In the
mid-1930s it was also closely related to concerns about arms manufacturers (‘merchants ofdeath’), and their pernicious effects on international stability.43 The MP and one-time
conscientious objector Morgan Jones, in the Commons in March 1932 expressed‘apprehension’ that ‘civil aviation is largely controlled by the Air Ministry…I fear they
regard civil aviation and its development purely from the standpoint of the convenience ofthe military machine; and we cannot afford to minister to that kind of mentality in thesedays.’44 Noel Baker turning in 1934 to consider why the Geneva Disarmament Conference
was failing, blamed civil servants, politicians, and arms manufacturers. He faulted
bureaucrats for their inertia and old-fashioned thinking, and politicians for the hold General
Staffs had on them. Military men, who ‘naturally’ loathed to reduce their military forces,
had in turn ‘had a powerful ally in the vested interests of the armament firms’. These, heargued, ‘by their manipulation of the Press, embroil the international situation, and obscurefrom hesitating politicians the strength of the popular demand for peace.’45
The militaristic perversion argument was also deployed by supporters of British aviation
to criticise foreign governments’ support for their aviation industries. For aviator andConservative MP Colonel Moore-Brabazon the First World War had led to massive
government support for military aviation, with commercial aviation lagging behind. ‘If
39 Noel Baker, Disarmament, pp. 11, 14.
40 Zaidi, ‘“Aviation Will Either Destroy or Save Our Civilization”’; Holman, ‘The Shadow of the Airliner’.
41 Madariaga, Disarmament, pp. 7–8. See also Madariaga, The World’s Design, pp. 64–9.
42 Davies, Problem of the Twentieth Century, 297-339.
43 Anderson, ‘British Rearmament and the “Merchants of Death”’.
44 Hansard (Commons), 5th ser., CCLXII, 10 Mar. 1931, cols. 2025-26.
45 Noel Baker, ‘Peace and the Official Mind’.

－ 28 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945
motoring had been born in war-time in the same way’, he quipped, ‘we should all be going
about the streets of London in tanks.’ Yet for him the British state was only guilty ofneglecting civilian aviation, or influencing its development indirectly. Italy, France andGermany had directly perverted civilian aviation by ‘fostering’ it for military purposes sothat it could act as a reserve in time of war.46
These critiques reached a highpoint in the years 1936 to 1938 when the government cameunder attack in Parliament and in the press for its large subsidies to Imperial Airways. The
airline, in turn, was condemned for its economic and operational inefficiency, andmistreatment of employees. The subsequent report of the Committee of Inquiry into Civil
Aviation (the ‘Cadman Report’) vindicated criticism of the way government managed andregulated commercial air routes, and so was seen by many as evidence of the militaristic
perversion of aviation. A Nature editorial welcomed the Report as proof that ‘throughout
the post-War period, the development of civil aviation in Great Britain as in other countries
has been warped by military demands.’ Nature in particular focused on the Cadman
Report’s claim that Air Ministry research had a ‘military bias’ and its recommendation that
research and development now be headed by a civil officer. Research areas which had been
neglected by this military bias, but which are now needed in order to keep pace with civil
aviation in the United States included, Nature noted, the prevention of ice formation,pressure cabins automatic blind landing equipment, anti-static electricity devices, andwireless.47 Internationalists too cited the Report in support for their calls for international
control – as in for example a 1943 memorandum by the Chatham House transport expert,
Harry Obsorne Mance.48

IV World War Two
The Second World War signalled two important changes in the discourses on convertibility.
First, aerial convertibility now came to be much more widely discussed and debated in the
United States, particularly in relation to the regulation of postwar international civil
aviation. Second, the notion that convertibility was easily achieved was now increasingly
challenged in policy debates, both in the United States and Britain. The massive wartime
military research and development efforts appeared to demonstrate that military technology
could not simply be converted from civilian science and technology. Development in aerial
technology appeared to demonstrate the increasing divergence of military aircraft from thecommercial.
Convertibility was debated in American think tanks and in government policy circles
during discussions on policy options for postwar international aviation. A few stressed theease of converting civilian transport to bombers. Professor of international law Oliver
Lissitzyn, writing in 1940 in Foreign Affairs, not only emphasised the importance ofcommercial aviation as a ‘reservoir of equipment and personnel for military aviation’, butalso claimed that ‘it is still possible to convert many of the modern airliners into fairly
efficient bombers…Civilian aircraft can also be used for training purposes’ and for ‘thetransportation of troops and supplies’. 49 On the whole, however, the discourses on
46 League of Nations Union, The Problem of the Air, pp. 22-3.
47 ‘Civil Aviation in Great Britain’, in Nature, 2 April 1938, pp. 571 – 73. On the Cadman report see: Lyth, ‘The

Changing Role of Government in British Civil Air Transport 1919-49’. On Imperial Airways see: Pirie, Air
Empire, pp. 178-234.
48 Mance, International Air Transport, p. 76.
49 Lissitzyn, ‘The Diplomacy of Air Transport’.

－ 29 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
convertibility stressed its limits. Arguing against full and quick convertibility of aircraft
helped policy-makers and experts make their case against strong international regulation ofinternational civilian aviation after the war. Experts on international relations at the New
York-based Council on Foreign Affairs, meeting in the early forties to discuss thepossibility of the formation of a postwar international political organisation, argued that
whereas the similarities in civilian and military aircraft in the early thirties may have madethe international control of aviation a real possibility then, this possibility had now receded,
due to the ‘rapidity of technical progress during the present war’.50 One 1940 memorandumon the need for postwar disarmament stressed only the possibility of converting commercial
aircraft to military transports, which however could be easily done as it required only the‘removal of unnecessary interior fittings’.51 Aerial analyst Keith Hutchison explained in his
widely-distributed 1944 pamphlet on postwar aviation that:
Since the beginning of the present war, however, we have seen increasing differences
between military and civil types. Fighter planes, for instance, have no civilian use
except possibly for stunt flying. Some bombers can be converted into transport planes,
but the result is a make-shift that will not appeal to the commercial operator who can
get anything better. The reverse process, converting transport planes into bombers, isless satisfactory.52
Nevertheless, it continued to be widely assumed in the United States that other aspects ofcivilian aerial infrastructure could be easily converted to military use. Since the 1920s
champions of American domestic aviation had been making the case for the developmentof domestic civil aviation by emphasising its utility for military purposes. These arguments
emerged most prominently during a 1934 Federal Commission on aviation, which had
listed four ways in which civilian industry could be used for military purposes. The reporthowever, noting that the convertibility of aircraft was widely assumed and feared inEurope, concluded that in the United States the military uses of civilian air transport‘depend for their value upon the volume of transport operation, not upon the type ofequipment used. Any similarity of design between transport and military airplanes is ofalmost incidental importance.’ Nevertheless the report had conceded the possibility of
military influence on the design of civilian aircraft by concluding that ‘We recommend that
nothing be done to encourage any such similarity’.53 These sentiments continued into thewar, where they were transferred into discussions on postwar international civil aviation. In
a Foreign Affairs article published in early 1942 international lawyer Grayson Kirk listed anumber of ways in which ‘civilian air lines perform an important military function’,including gathering data on weather conditions and developing pilot experience. 54 Civil
aviation expert J. Parker Van Zandt’s 1944 study on postwar Civil Aviation and Peace
similarly argued against the direct convertibility of civilian aircraft to fighting military
aircraft, but nevertheless pointed out that civilian aviation could not be ‘de-militarised’ as it
could perform at least seven vital military services during wartime.55 The internationalist
Universities Committee on Post-War International Problems, which polled its member
50 G. Kirk, ‘International Policing (A Survey of Recent Proposals)’, 3 Oct. 1941, W-83-A-B30, Fiche 376,
Council on Foreign Relations Papers, LSE Library, London School of Economics and Political Science.
51 Warner, Possibilities of Controlling or Limiting Aircraft.
52 Hutchison, Freedom of the Air, p. 13.
53 Federal Aviation Commission, Report of the Federal Aviation Commission, p. 79.
54 Kirk, ‘Wings over the Pacific’.
55 Van Zandt, Civil Aviation and Peace, pp. 23, 27.

－ 30 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945
university committees in 1944 also found that its respondents concluded that although‘because of increasing functional specialization of aircraft design, planes for civil air traffic
cannot be directly converted to military use’, nevertheless ‘aircraft production facilities,
aircraft mechanics and air crews can be.’56 And, indeed, from 1942 onwards the UnitedStates increasingly pressed civilian aviation into military use, including the use of civilian
airliners for as military transports through newly formed organisations such as the Air
Corps Ferrying Command and the Air Transport Command.57
In Britain, internationalists demanding strong international regulation of military andcivil aviation continued to warn of the dangers of convertibility. Chatham House’s transport
expert, H. Osborne Mance, for example, produced a series of reports calling for theinternational control of aviation, citing the continued convertibility of civil to military
aircraft as a rationale.58 Supporters of British civil and military aviation also continued touse convertibility arguments to push for greater suppression of German and Italian civil
aviation after the war. Yet their support for convertibility was tempered with the realisationthat the same arguments could be used in support of international control of British
aviation. Aerial industrialist Frederick Handley-Page, writing in International Affairs in
1944, agreed with Mance that ‘it is impossible to separate the manufacture of civil aircraftfrom that of military aircraft. Undoubtedly, this view will be reflected in measures to place
the aircraft industries of the Axis Powers under drastic control, and preferably to suppress
them altogether.’ However, this did not portend the international control of civil aviation,for:How far civil and military aeroplanes might be readily interchangeable in future isdifficult to estimate. They may follow the ship and become more and more distinct; or,conceivably, the invention of some new kind of weapon which did not need special
gun-turrets and bomb-bays might make them interchangeable merely by the
installation or removal of special war equipment. In an art and science so fluid asaeronautical engineering, it is unwise to be dogmatic.59
By the end of the war, the notion of converting civilian aircraft to aggressive military use
died altogether, and the word ‘convertibility’ followed soon thereafter. The 1944 Chicago
Conference on international civil aviation acquiesced to the American vision of postwar
aviation by laying the foundation for a lightly regulated aerial regime which was buttressedby the assumption that civilian airliners were of little military value. Convertibility was
discussed at the conference, but the winning view was expressed by Adolf A. Berle, theU.S. Assistant Secretary of State, when he informed the conference that ‘According toexperts, it is not possible to convert a peaceful transport plane into an effective instrumentof war despite wide-spread popular misconception to the contrary’.60
Civilian aircraft and their associated facilities continued to be seen as having military
value as a ‘reserve’. The 1948 the U.S. Air Policy Commission Report, Survival in the Air
Age, for example, made the case for continued government support for the civilian aircraft
industry and ‘personal aviation’ by arguing that in any future war airlines would be used
56 Universities Committee on Post-War International Problems, ‘Summaries of Reports of CooperatingGroups’.
57 Larsen, ‘The Air Transport Command’.
58 Mance, International Air Transport; idem, Frontiers, Peace Treaties, and International Organization.
59 Handley-Page, ‘International Air Transport’.
60 Berle Jr., ‘International Civil Aviation Conference’. On the conference see, Sochor, The Politics ofInternational Aviation; Dobson, A History of International Civil Aviation, pp. 37-51.

－ 31 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
for military transport, and civilian factories, facilities and personnel more broadly for
America’s air forces.61 This was part of a continuing wider prevailing view that civilian
factories could be easily pressed into military use. Henry Morgenthau, Jr.’s proposals forthe deindustrialisation of occupied Germany, for example, were based on the assumptionthat heavy industry was required for modern mechanized military forces, and that
individual civilian factories may be ‘converted’ to military use. His 1945 polemic Germany
is Our Problem focused in particular on the metallur­gical, chemical and electrical industries(though without any reference to the convertibility of individual aeroplanes or ships).62
Other allied planners organising for German disarmament paid more attention to which
factories, industries, technologies, and sciences needed to be decommissioned, and whichshould be allowed to function. The U.S. Foreign Economic Administration (and later, theState Department) were however unable to produce coherent recommendations fordifferentiating safe from unsafe industries and factories. Implicit in their 1945
recommendations to the Allied occupying authorities was the recognition that almost allindustry had military value. They suggested ongoing inspection of industry and scientificresearch and development by the occupying authorities as a means of preventing German
military resurgence, rather than wholesale destruction of heavy industry. At the Potsdam
Conference the Allies decided that all shipyards and aircraft factories were to be
decommissioned. In March 1946 however the Allied Control Council produced their own
lists of plant and machinery to be destroyed, but these largely choose to differentiate
between safe and unsafe industry by targeting for destruction plant which produced specificmaterials such as magnesium, Beryllium, and synthetic oil and rubber. The exception was
the shipping industry, where all ships (excluding fishing vessels) were to be
decommissioned.63
During the Second World War, the militaristic perversion argument was rarely found in
U.S. discussions on postwar disarmament or aviation, and even in Britain it was greatly
diminished in these discussions and the discourses that surrounded them. In the interwar
years the argument had been used in order to bolster the case for more civilian technicalinvolvement in scientific and technological research and development. During the Second
World War civilian technical experts were pressed into the service of the war effort, often
in decisive advisory or decision-making positions, thus reducing the usefulness of theperversion argument. Criticising Allied militaries for abusing science and technology forwarlike purposes in the midst of what was widely seen as a righteous war was anyhow
problematic. Nor was the projection of perversion arguments onto Germany easy when
Allied militaries were themselves using many of the same technologies, such as bombers,in the same way. Elements of the argument continued to exist of course, particularly thenotion that technologies such as aviation (in particular) were essentially peaceful both in its
effects and in its origins. Van Zandt’s Civil Aviation and Peace pointed civil aviation’s
peaceful effects, posited military aviation as a different type of aviation, and only related
military and civil aviation through seven ways in which civil aviation could be used formilitary purposes. This, however, was not described as a perversion, but rather as a naturalnecessity during wartime. Perversion arguments remained more prominent in Britain, andwere mostly associated calls for the control of postwar civil aviation by a powerfulinternational organisation. The Labour Party’s policy on postwar aviation, issued in 1944,
61 Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age, pp. 59, 123-4
62 Morgenthau, Jr., Germany is our Problem, pp. 13, 16-7.
63 Oliver Haller, ‘Destroying Weapons of Coal, Air and Water’, pp. 160-206; and Cassidy, ‘Controlling German

Science’. On German disarmament generally see, Towle, Enforced Disarmament, chapter 8.

－ 32 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945
for example, began with the argument that militaristic attitudes still threatened the pacificdevelopment of civil aviation, and consequently that international control would be
required after the war. Similarly, state committees (such as the Shelmerdine Committee)
considering postwar civil aviation recommended international control, and cited the need toprotect civil aviation from militaristic abuse as an important reason. Once international
control was rejected at the 1944 Chicago Conference on international aviation, however,these arguments disappeared.64

V Conclusion
Convertibility was a widely held belief and a widely used trope in the interwar years
because it could easily be mobilised to support a wide range of positions with regard to theaviation and chemicals industries, arms control, state regulation, and criticism of foreignstates. It could be, and was, used to support a range of political positions: nationalist,
internationalist, liberal, and conservative. Militaristic perversion arguments were morenarrowly located within liberal internationalist discourses. Both fed off widely held
assumptions about the nature of modern science, technology, and military-civilian relations.
It was widely assumed that modern armaments originated in civilian scientific invention,
which was then developed for military purposes. For many the natural, including the mosteconomical, trajectory of scientific and technological development was civilian, with themilitaristic development a perversion. These arguments moreover reflected a largely
enthusiastic attitude towards modern industry, including civilian aviation in particular. In
these discourses it was largely accepted that the British state needed to support the growthof modern scientific industries – the question was the extent of military involvement andstate control.
Once the growth of massive military research and development during the Second World
War, and the attendant development of military aircraft, challenged this assumption,
convertibility dropped away from the discourses on military weapons and arms control. It
did not disappear altogether however – it was revived after the war in 1946 during attempts
at atomic disarmament, in the form of for example the influential U.S. state departmentsponsored Acheson-Lilienthal Report and the official U.S. Baruch Plan placed before theUnited Nations, the former of which based its proposals for international control of atomic
energy on the notion that the ‘development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and thedevelopment of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable andinterdependent.’65 Although attempts at the international control of atomic energy failed,notions of convertibility would survive and continue to be used in discourses surrounding
the international regulation of atomic activities in the 1950s, and nuclear arms control in
the 1960s. These beliefs about the convertibility of technology live on today throughconcepts such as ‘dual use technology’ and are institutionalized in the work of internationalorganizations such as the IAEA.66
Recognising the convertibility and militaristic perversion arguments as an integral part of64 Van Zandt, Civil Aviation and Peace, 23, 27. The Labour Party, Wings for Peace. TNA, Interdepartmental
Committee on Civil Aviation, Interim Report to the Minister without Portfolio, CAB 117/187, 5 Jan. 1942. On
state planning for postwar aviation see: Brewin, ‘British Plans for International Operating Agencies for Civil
Aviation’.
65 Barnard et al., A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy.
66 The Statutes of the IAEA, approved 1956, note that the organisation is formed to prevent the ‘diversion’ ofatomic facilities from civilian to military use. See, https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/statute.pdf, accessed 25
Mar. 2017.

－ 33 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
interwar and wartime discourses on disarmament is an important step in furthering ourunderstanding of the history of arms control. These arguments helped construct and shape
notions of what disarmament meant, as well as the boundaries between the civilian andmilitary industry, technology, and science. Their study consequently points to the sociallyconstructed and contingent nature of concepts often at the heart of arms control, and to thedeep connections between these concepts and the politics and political positions of theirday. The existence of these arguments points to the need to move beyond diplomacy andpolicy-making, and to study arms control in wider cultural, political, and social contexts.
References
Ahmann, R., A.M. Birke, and M. Howard, The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security
1918-1957 (London, 1993).
Air Policy Commission, Survival in the Air Age (Washington, D.C., 1948).
Anderson, D.G., ‘British Rearmament and the ‘Merchants of Death’: the 1935-36 Royal Commission on
the Manufacture of and Trade in Armaments’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), pp. 5-37.
Barnard, C.I., J. R. Oppenheimer, et al., A Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy(Washington, D.C., 1946).
Berle, Jr., A.A., ‘International Civil Aviation Conference’, Vital Speeches of the Day, 11 (1944), pp. 124-8.
Brewin, C., ‘British Plans for International Operating Agencies for Civil Aviation, 1941-1945’,
International History Review, 4 (1982), pp. 91-110.
Buckley, T.H., ‘The Icarus Factor: the American Pursuit of Myth in Naval Arms Control, 1921-36’, in E.
Goldstein and J. Maurer, eds., The Washington Conference, 1921-22: Naval Rivalry, East Asian Stability
and the Road to Pearl Harbor (London, 1994), pp. 124-46.
Burney, C.D., The World, The Air and the Future (London, 1929)
Carlton, D., ‘The Problem of Civil Aviation in British Air Disarmament Policy, 1919-1934’, Royal UnitedService Institution Journal, 111 (1966), pp. 307 -16.
Carlton, D., ‘Great Britain and the Coolidge Naval Disarmament Conference’, Political Science Quarterly,
83 (1968), pp. 573- 98.
Cassidy, D., ‘Controlling German Science, I: U.S. and Allied Forces in Germany, 1945-1947’, Historical
Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 24 (1994), 197-235.
Clark-Hall, R.H., ‘The Value of Civil Aviation as a Reserve to the Royal Air Force in the Time of War’,
Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, LXIX, (1924), pp. 415-32.
Dalton, H., Towards the Peace of Nations: A Study in International Politics (London, 1928).
Davies, D., ‘Disarmament’, Transaction of the Grotius Society, 5 (1919), pp. 109-18.
Davies, D., Problem of the Twentieth Century: A Study in International Relationships (London, 1930).
Davies, T.R., ‘France and the World Disarmament Conference of 1932-34’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 15(2004), 765-80.
Dobson, A., A History of International Civil Aviation: From Its Origins Through Transformative Evolution(Abingdon, 2017).
Doty, R., ‘Aporia: A Critical Exploration of the Agent–Structure Problematique in International Relations
Theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 3 (1997), pp. 365-92.
Edgerton, D., England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke,1991).
Edgerton, D., Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970 (Cambridge, 2006).
Fanning, R.W., Peace and Disarmament: Naval Rivalry and Arms Control 1922-1933 (Lexington,
Kentucky, 1995).
Federal Aviation Commission, Report of the Federal Aviation Commission (Washington, D.C., 1935).
Fradkin, E.K., ‘Chemical Weapons – Its Possibilities and Probabilities’, International Conciliation, 248(1929), pp. 113-92.
Goldman, E.O., Sunken Treaties: Naval Arms Control between the Wars (University Park, Pennsylvania,
1994).
Groves, P.R.C., Our Future in the Air: A Survey of the Vital Question of British Air Power (London, 1922).
Groves, P.R.C., Behind the Smoke Screen (London, 1934).
Hall, C., Britain, America and Arms Control, 1921-37 (Basingstoke, 1987).

－ 34 －

Convertibility and the Militaristic Perversion of Aviation in Disarmament Discourses, 1919-1945
Haller, O., ‘Destroying Weapons of Coal, Air and Water: A Critical Evaluation of the American Policy ofGerman Industrial Demilitarization 1945-1952’ (unpub. Ph.D. thesis, Philipps-Universität Marburg,
2005).
Handley-Page, F., “International Air Transport”. By Sir Osborne Mance, assisted by J.E. Wheeler,
International Affairs, 20, (1944), 281-82
Holman, B., ‘The Shadow of the Airliner: Commercial Bombers and the Rhetorical Destruction of Britain,
1917-35’, Twentieth Century British History, 24 (2013), pp. 495-517.
Howe, A., ‘Free Trade and Global Order: the Rise and Fall of a Victorian Vision’, in Duncan Bell, ed.,Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century PoliticalThought (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 26-46.
Hutchison, K., Freedom of the Air (New York, 1944).
Jackson, P., ‘France and the Problems of Security and International Disarmament after the First World
War’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 29 (2006), pp. 247-80.
Kaufman, G.R., Arms Control During the Pre-Nuclear Age: The United States and Naval Limitation
Between the Two World Wars (New York, 1990).
Kitching, C.J., Britain and the Problem of International Disarmament 1919-34 (London, 1999).
Kitching, C.J., Britain and the Geneva Disarmament Conference: A Study in International History(Houndsmills, 2003).
Kirk, G., ‘Wings over the Pacific’, Foreign Affairs, 20 (1942), pp. 293-302.
The Labour Party, Wings for Peace: Labour’s Post-War Policy for Civil Flying (London, 1944).
Larsen, A.J., ‘The Air Transport Command’, Minnesota History, 26 (1945), pp. 1-18.
Larsen, H., Foreign Policy and Discourse Analysis: France, Britain and Europe (London, 2005).
League of Nations Union, The Problem of the Air (London, 1935).
Lefebure, V., Scientific Disarmament (London, 1931).
Lissitzyn, O.J., ‘The Diplomacy of Air Transport’, Foreign Affairs, 19 (1940), pp. 156-70.
Lyth, P.J., ‘The Changing Role of Government in British Civil Air Transport 1919-49’, in Robert Millward
and John Singleton, eds., The Political Economy of Nationalisation in Britain, 1920-1950 (Cambridge,1995), pp. 65 - 87.
Madariaga, S.D., Disarmament (London, 1929).
Madariaga, S.D., The World’s Design (London, 1938).
Mance, H.O., International Air Transport (London, 1943).
Mance, H.O., Frontiers, Peace Treaties, and International Organization (London, 1946).
McKercher, B.J.C., ed., Arms Limitation and Disarmament: Restraints on War, 1899-1939 (Westport,
Connecticut, 1992).
Meilinger, P.S., ‘Disarmament and Airpower, 1932-1934: Clipping the Bomber’s Wings’, The RUSI
Journal, 142 (1997), pp. 79 – 82.
Milliken, J., ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Research
Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5 (1999), pp. 225-54.
Morgenthau, Jr., H., Germany is our Problem (New York, 1945).
Noel Baker, P.J., Disarmament (London, 1926).
Noel Baker, P.J., Disarmament and the Coolidge Conference (London, 1927).
Noel Baker, P.J., ‘Peace and the Official Mind’, in Idem. et al., eds., Challenge to Death (London, 1934),
pp. 67 - 89.
O’Brien, P.P., British and American Naval Power: Politics and Policy, 1900-1936 (Westport, Connecticut,1998).
Pigou, A.C., The Political Economy of War (London, 1921).
Pirie, G., Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation (Manchester, 2009).
Raleigh, W., The War in the Air (Oxford, 1922).
Richardson, D., The Evolution of British Disarmament Policy in the 1920s (London, 1989).
Shuster, R.J., German Disarmament after World War I (Abingdon, 2006).
Sochor, E., The Politics of International Aviation (Houndsmills, 1991).
Spaight, J. M., An International Air Force (London, 1932).
Spiers, E.M., Chemical Warfare (Basingstoke, 1986).
Spiers, E.M., ‘Gas Disarmament in the 1920s: Hopes Confounded’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 29,(2006), pp. 281-300.
Sykes, F.H., Aviation in Peace and War (London, 1922).
Sykes, F.H., ‘Memorandum by the Chief of the Air Staff on air-power requirements of the Empire’, in－ 35 －

S. WAQAR H. ZAIDI
Idem., From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London, 1942), pp. 558–74.
Thomson, C.B., Air Facts and Problems (London, 1927).
Towle, P., Enforced Disarmament: From the Napoleonic Campaigns to the Gulf War (Oxford, 1997).
Universities Committee on Post-War International Problems, ‘Summaries of Reports of CooperatingGroups’, International Conciliation, 410 (1945), pp. 249-60.
Vaïsse, M., Sécurité D’abord: la Politique Française en Matière de Désarmement, 9 Décembre 1930 – 17
Avril 1934 (Paris, 1981).
Van Zandt, J.P., Civil Aviation and Peace (Washington, D.C., 1944).
Warner, E.P., Possibilities of Controlling or Limiting Aircraft Suitable for Offense against Ground
Objectives (New York, 1940).
Webster, A., ‘From Versailles to Geneva: The Many Forms of Interwar Disarmament’, The Journal ofStrategic Studies, 29 (2006), pp. 225-46.
Zaidi, S.W.H., ‘“Aviation Will Either Destroy or Save Our Civilization’: Proposals for the International
Control of Aviation, 1920-1945,” Journal of Contemporary History, 46 (2011), pp. 150-78.
Zaidi, S.W.H., ‘Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in Interwar Britain and the
U.S.’, in D. Laqua, ed., Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between
the World Wars (London, 2011), 17-43.
Official Publications
Foreign Relations of the United States 1919, IV, (Washington, D.C., 1943), pp. 370-1, Supreme Council,
17 Mar. 1919.
League of Nations, Organisation for Communications and Transit. Series of League of Nations
publications, VIII, (Geneva, 1930), P.R.C. Groves, ‘The Relations between Civil and Military Aviation,
by P. R. C. Groves’, in Enquiries into the Economic, Administrative and Legal Situation of International
Air Navigation.
League of Nations, Air Commission of the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments, IX,(Geneva, 1932), pp. 47 – 8, Objective Study on The Internationalisation Of Civil Aviation.

－ 36 －