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filibustered for three hours pressuring the Ad Hoc Committee chair–
man, Ule Adeniji of Nigeria, to set up a special drafting group to
consider a Bulgarian proposal called "The Prevention of Nuclear
War. " The two-page proposal was largely an elaboration of the
Soviet" no first use" pledge, and was viewed by both Western and
neutral countries as a tactic for highlighting the U.S.S.R. initiative
and as a "fall-back" maneuver: sensing that the session would end
in failure, the Eastern bloc could argue that it had attempted to
"rescue" the proceedings by introducing the proposal as a "short–
list" comprehensive program for disarmament.
The U.S. denounced the Eastern initiative by arguing that the
prevention of nuclear war was an issue that pervaded the compre–
hensive program draft and that to isolate it from the draft for the
program was to trivialize it. (At one point during these exchanges,
the Soviet delegate solemnly queried, "Is the United States delegate
saying that he is against the prevention of nuclear war? ") At any
rate, the Ad Hoc Committee chairman eventually caved in to Soviet
pressure, and a special drafting group was set up to deal with the
issue. At its first meeting, a joint West German-Netherlands pro–
posal was submitted as an alternative to the Bulgarian draft. The
Western proposal, which was largely based on an existing U .S.–
Soviet agreement, signed in 1973 and call ed, appropriately enough,
"The Prevention of Nuclear War," contained references to "more
openness and transparency" regarding military budgets, and an
item calling on nuclear weapons states to agree to "verifiable reduc–
tions" in their nuclear arsenals. This proposal was unacceptable to
the East. Several other proposals were submitted by the nonaligned
and neutral countries, however, and by the following Wednesday the
delegates felt they had made constructive progress. On Wednesday
night, it was agreed that the Dutch delegate should synthesize the
various proposals that had been submitted and prepare a compro–
mise draft for consideration at the next meeting, scheduled for 10:00
the following morning.
Assembling promptly at ten the next day, the delegates sat in a
conference room, waiting for the East German delegate, who was
the chairman of the group, to appear. Shortly before he finally
arrived-two hours later at noon-the Soviet delegate suddenly
announced to the delegates present that "this group no longer has an
official statute" and that technically it did not exist. He added,
"This is a silly exercise with which the Soviet Union no longer wants
