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The Part of International Law in the Further Limitation of Naval Armament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2017

Charles Cheney Hyde
Charles Cheney Hyde*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

Naval fleets are maintained by development and replacement because their possessors dare not fail to make provision for a maritime war in which they may be participants. No means yet devised and accepted for the amicable adjustment of international differences have removed from responsible statesmen a sense of the necessity of anticipating such a contingency. Despite increasing efforts in every quarter to cultivate wills for peace and abhorrence of armed conflict, as well as a desire to adjust grave differences by judicial process or through commissions of conciliation, war is still regarded as a contingency which must be reckoned with, and as one which is as dangerous as it is seemingly remote. In making provision as against a contingency which none would welcome or hasten, the governments of maritime states do not necessarily encourage war or indicate approval of recourse to it. A particular conference of maritime states may in fact uplift the hopes of prospective belligerents which resent and oppose agreements restricting recourse to measures and instrumentalities on which they expect to rely. On the other hand, general arrangements respecting belligerent activities may serve to lessen a zeal for war and to remove its very approach further from the horizon. Everything depends upon the ambitions of the states which consent to confer. The point to be observed is that agreements for the regulation of maritime war in so far as they purport to proscribe or check the use of particular instrumentalities or recourse to particular measures, are not to be deemed bellicose in design or effect. Such regulatory agreements are advocates of peace rather than of war. Moreover, as will be seen, they may be the means of encouraging states to reduce armaments which would otherwise be maintained.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1926 , pp. 237 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 1926

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References

2 House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1905, Vol. 39, p. 35.

3 No attempt is here made to discuss what, according to American opinion, would be deemed the scope of the belligerent right under existing law.

4 Deuxième Conferénce Internationale de la Paix, Actes et Documents, III, 766.

5 Id

6 Naval War College, International Law Topics and Discussions, 1913, 148.

7 Conference on the Limitation of Armament, Senate Doc. No. 126, 67th Cong., 2d Sess., 315.

8 Id, 274.

9 Rear-Admiral William Sowden Sims, U. S. N., The Victory at Sea, published by Doubleday, Page and Company, 1920, p. 33.

10 Id, 34.

11 It will be recalled that the treaty between the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan relating to the Use of Submarines and Noxious Gases in Warfare, concluded at the Conference on Limitation of Armament, February 6, 1922, did not purport to deal with the special equities of unarmedships as such.

12 Informal and confidential letter from the Secretary of State to the British Ambassador, January 18, 1916, American White Book, European War, III, 162, 164.

13 Conference on the Limitation of Armament, Senate Doc. No. 126, 67th Cong., Sess. 2, pp. 266, 267.

14 Id, 268, 269.

15 Id, 270,271.

16 Id, 271.

17 Id, 271, 272.

18 Id, 273-276.

19 Id, 278-285.

20 Id, 300, 301.

21 Id, 886.

22 Id, 276.