Evening star., 1951-03-06
A World Military Census?

In challenging the Soviet Union to cooperate
in worldwide census of armed forces and non
atomic weapons our American representative on
the United Nations Commission for Conventional
Armaments has revived an old proposal persist
emily rejected by the Russians 1t has been
brought up again % because of their propa-
ganda claim that they are maintaining military
strength only about half the size of the Vests,
and (2) because the subject might well be placed
on any agenda that the current Big Four Paris
meeting may be able to work out for full-dress
conference of Foreign Ministers.
The proposal-which France first submitted
to the United Nations about three years ago
calls upon every member country to give full
accounting of the number of men it has under
arms and to make public an inventory of its nom
atomic weapons. 1t provides also for the verifl-
cation of all reported figures by special teams
of u. N. inspectors who would be free to go any,
where-on either side of the Iron Curtain-to
make careful check on each powers claims, thus
guarding as much as possible against distortions
or Justification. That done, steps would then be
taken to negotiate and put into effect sys-
tematic, step-by- step program of world diSarnla-
ment.
However, although approved by the over
whelming majority of the General Assembly and
the Security Council this plan has long been
gathering dust as a result of having been vetoed
by the Russians veto they have sought to
justify on the ground that the proposed census
would not include A-weapons and lacked specific
provisions for arms reductions In holding fast
to that line of argument, the men of the Kremlin
have bandly ignored the fact that disarmament
negotiations cannot be held without a prior
accounting of military strength and that
A-weapons and other instruments of mass de-
struction belong in a special category requiring
unprecedented controls of the sort worked out
by the U. N. Atomic Energy Commission-con-
trolls rejected by the Soviet Union.
In view of all this, it may seem little bit
silly to expect that the Russians will now sud-
denly reverse themselves by accepting our
American challenge, agreeing to join in an in
ternational military census, and opening the
Iron Curtain wide enough to permit an effective
U. N. check on the conventional weapons and
numbers of troops being held in readiness inside
the Soviet Union and the satellite countries.
Nevertheless the challenge is pertinent and we'll
timed as put-up-or -Shut-up rejoinder to the
Kremlin's claim that its armed forces are much
smaller than those in the West. Beyond that,
the whole subject is certainly germane to the
effort being made in Paris to draft an agenda
for new Big Four conference
1t is true enough of course, that even if the
Russians should accept the idea of a military
census the world would not automatically be-
come safer. Actually, wholly apart from the
difficulties of inspection in country as vast and
secretive as the Soviet Union, such census
would deal, relatively speaking, only with pea
shooters. The big things-A-weaponS, whose
effective control is essential to international Sc
curity-would still be untouched. That said, how
ever. the fact remains that If the Kremlin agreed