This article investigates the creation and workings of the Disarmament Section of the League of Nations Secretariat. It shows that the Disarmament Section was an outlier of the Secretariat: supressed by the Great Powers, it had less autonomy than other parts of the administration, which from an early stage limited its bureaucratic practice to the production of information. This bureaucratic production created unreliable factual foundations for negotiations and unrealistic public expectations. Thus, the article argues that the troubled birth and administrative strangling of the Disarmament Section of the Secretariat should play a significant role in our understanding of the broader collapse of general disarmament. By making this argument, the article breaks new ground by introducing failure as an analytical category to understand the role and practices of international public administrations.

本文调查了国际联盟秘书处裁军科的创建和运作。这表明裁军科是秘书处的一个局外人：受到大国的压制，与行政部门的其他部门相比，它的自主权较少，这从早期就将其官僚作风限制在信息生产上。这种官僚主义的产物为谈判和不切实际的公众期望创造了不可靠的事实基础。因此，文章认为，秘书处裁军科的困境诞生和行政扼杀应该在我们理解全面裁军的更广泛崩溃方面发挥重要作用。通过提出这个论点，