Bilateral and trilateral subcommittee meetings:

Editorial Note

At the end of the first week of discussions the work of the preliminary talks was further broken down into subcommittees. Four tripartite and three bipartite (US–UK) subcommittees were established to consider the following subjects: Subcommittee A—closer tripartite association (United States Delegation chaired by Labouisse), Subcommittee B—German problems (United States Delegation [Page 903] chaired by Perry Laukhuff, Director of the Office of German Political Affairs), Subcommittee C—Southeast Asia (United States Delegation chaired by Livingston T. Merchant, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs), Subcommittee D—colonial questions (United States Delegation chaired by Raymond A. Hare, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs), Subcommittee P—closer US–UK association, (United States Delegation chaired by Labouisse), Subcommittee Q—Near East (United States Delegation chaired by Hare), Subcommittee R—Southeast Asia (bipartite, United States Delegation chaired by Merchant).

At the same time the bilateral and trilateral meetings of the previous week continued as did informal meetings on topics that were not germane to the business of any of the subcommittees. Following its first meeting, Subcommittee B was further subdivided into two committees or working groups, designated by the letters a and b, to consider respectively economic and political problems. Finally toward the end of the second week of preliminary discussions the three delegations began to meet in plenary to approve the various reports and papers agreed by the subcommittees or at other meetings for submission to the Foreign Ministers for discussion or approval.

The documentation that follows, because of the complexity and volume of the documentation on the proceedings of the second week, presents only the main lines of policy and has been arranged topically to correspond generally with the work of the several subcommittees.