ABSTRACT
Awareness of efforts in the United Nations (UN) to promote the concept of confidence-building measures on a worldwide basis is miniscule, even in circles familiar with the effort in Europe. The Eastern group has seen the Confidence-building measure (CBM) exercise largely as another way of promoting the Soviet Union's longstanding prescriptions for peace and security—nonaggression pacts and no-first-use of nuclear weapons. The proposal that the UN take up the question of global CBMs was first raised formally at the Tenth Special Session of the UNGA devoted to disarmament in 1978 in a speech by then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the Federal Republic of Germany. The FRG Chairman of the experts group made a determined effort to achieve a consensus document and managed to limit the reflections of disagreement largely to a single chapter, the one that presented an illustrative list of possible CBMs.
