High-level debate, innovative proposals highlight session; no consensus on concluding document; the vital objective: terminating the arms race.

• Position: Includes related article - Third special Assembly on disarmament

The early morning skies over the UN Headquarters complex on the East River were threatening, gray and gloomy. It was just after 6 a.m. on Sunday, 26 June. And, after all-night consultations, delegates to the third special session of the General Assembly on disarmament had to acknowledge that they had been unable to reach consensus on a Concluding Document setting out new aims and priorities in the field of disarmament.

The vital objective:

Terminating the arms race

"As though by design and not by accident", noted Sweden's representative Maj Britt Theorin wryly as ominous rolls of thunder interrupted ambassadorial statements expressing regret at the session's disappointing end. She had been among those who had pleaded for more time, hoping differences could be bridged, convinced consensus was possible.

But despite the many months of intensive preparations and, at the session itself, scores of hours of behind-closed-door negotiations, the final gavel was sounded at 7:25 a.m. that Sunday, no agreement having been reached.

The Assembly had opened on 31 May in an atmosphere charged with expectations, bolstered by what many called a "new international political climate", holding open, it was hoped, new possibilities for the disarmament process.

Secretary,-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, at the session's opening, said it was a "striking coincidence" that the session was opening at the same time that the USSR-United States summit was taking place in Moscow.

"The dynamics of human affairs have brought us to a stage where we need no longer view, the prospects of credible measures towards disamament as remote," he said, welcoming the joint expressions by the two major military Powers that a nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought.

Twenty-six days later, however, the view was somewhat different, "Basic national positions were not amenable to a compromise text," the Secretary-General said at the session's conclusion.

"Divergent positions made consensive impossible", said General Assembly President Peter Florin of the German Democratic Republic, adding that efforts to find new language arid a new approach had been paralleled by "the continuing existence of old problem and attitudes".

The special session-the fifteenth in UN history, the third in 10 years on the subject of disarmament-was the largest, most representative meeting of nations ever gathered to consider disarmament issues.

All 159 Member States were joined by several hundred...