The fifteen countries members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) were represented by their defense ministers at a conference held in Paris from October 10 to 12, under the chairmanship of Lord Ismay (Vice Chairman of the North Atlantic Council and Secretary General of NATO). The meeting, which was attended by the Standing Group and the Supreme Commanders, was a preliminary to the full ministerial session, to be held in December; it was the first occasion on which the NATO defense ministers met in Council without the foreign or finance ministers. A communique issued at the close of the meeting stated that the meeting had primarily been for the exchange of information, and that the ministers had heard statements on the strategic situation and on western defensive arrangements from General Sir John Whiteley (United Kingdom), Chairman of the Standing Group, and from his colleagues on the Standing Group, General Joseph Lawton Collins (United States), General Jean Valluy (France), General Alfred M. Gruenther (SACEUR), Admiral Jerauld Wright (SACLANT) and several other officers. Following these statements, a useful exchange of views between the defense ministers took place, the communique concluded. It was reported that many of the speakers had concurred in the view that the military potential of the Soviet Union was steadily increasing, especially in the areas of atomic weapons and submarines, that the recently announced decision to reduce the armed forces in the Soviet Union and some of the people's democracies did not modify the potential of communist forces, and that it was therefore indispensable to intensify the NATO military effort, which so far had not met expectations for it.