First, I should like to add the profound sympathy of the United States Government to the condolences Which have already been expressed to the family and people, of the late Imam of. Yemen. Our earnest hopes go out to the new Imam for a successful and fruitful reign.
38. I should like to begin by reaffirming as emphatically as I can the high significance which the Government of the United States attaches to the work of the United Nations. My Government is more than ever convinced that the success or failure of this Organization could well mean the difference between world order and world anarchy. We believe that the work that lies before the seventeenth session of the General Assembly is serious —and that it is also urgent.
39. But first let me, on behalf of my Government and of the City of New York, welcome the representatives to this historic Assembly. We congratulate you, Mr. President; on your election as President of the seventeenth session of the General Assembly. You assume a place of honour among the world leaders who have been chosen to preside over the forum of the world in a time of peril and promise —a, place which your talents and attainments can only further exalt.
40. And I also warmly welcome the addition to our membership of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Rwanda and Burundi: four new nations from sunny lands blessed with tropic beauty which I have had the good fortune to-visit and to admire.
41. But I welcome most of all the opportunity this session gives us to consider as a body the direction in which our affairs are moving and the action heeded to bring us closer to the world we seek —a world of justice, freedom and peace.
42. A year ago we met at a time of doubt and of danger la the twelve months since, much has taken place to justify a measure of fresh hope for the future. A long, bitter war in Algeria has come to a close. A threatened conflict between two of our Members in the South-west Pacific has yielded to peaceful settlement, through statesmanship on their part and skilful conciliation by the United Nations. In Laos, civil war, abetted by foreign intervention, has been replaced by a cease-fire and an independent government under international guarantees. In the Congo, where the United Nations has played such a decisive part, war and the threat of war seem to be yielding to new hopes for the peaceful reintegration of Katanga into the Congo State and to the Secretary-General's vigorous efforts, with our support and. that, of the great majority of the Members, to get early implementation of the United Nations reconciliation plan. Disarmament negotiations, with the encouragement of the General Assembly, have resumed in a new forum with non-nuclear Powers playing a useful and constructive role. We have begun, under United Nations auspices, a search for co-operation in the development of outer space, in the interests not of any one nation but of humanity. We have begun, too, an intensification of the drive against poverty under the United Nations Development Decade.
43. Those are all legitimate sources of gratification, and there-are others. But we Would be deceiving ourselves if we looked on the bright side alone. We still —all of us— contribute to live in a dark and precarious world. The crisis in Berlin has not exploded into war, but the pressures and harassments against West Berlin continue to rank as a most ominous threat to the peace of the world. The Government of Cuba; with moral and material support from outside, carries on a campaign of subversion and vituperation against its neighbours in the Western Hemisphere. Unprovoked aggression from North Viet-Nam continues to threaten the freedom and independence of the Republic of Viet-Nam and to menace the peace in South-East Asia. The Chinese Communists continue their policy of provocation, their, acts of force and subversion. The threat of conflict still smoulders in the Middle East, damped down but not quenched by the peace-keeping machinery of the United Nations. Disputes involving Members of our Organization continue unresolved on every continent. The continued repression of the peoples of Eastern Europe remains an underlying danger to peace. The concluding Stage of the world-wide movement towards national independence elsewhere is complicated by issues which, though transient and manageable, could become explosive if cool heads do not prevail over shot tempers. The prevalence of poverty in great areas of the world remains a source of moral frustration and political danger. And, most ominous of all, the suicidal arms race continues unabated.
44. Those situations raise serious dangers, to the peace of the world. It was to deal with such dangers to the peace that half of the States in this Assembly Hall established the United Nations seventeen years ago, and that the other half have adhered to the Charter in the years since.
45. The Charter issued a lofty challenge to mankind. It cannot be claimed that in these seventeen years the United Nations has established a reign of peace on earth. But the record of our Organization in meeting specific challenges to the peace is none the less impressive. In these years the United Nations, whether through the Security Council or the General Assembly, through conciliation or cease-fire, through peace observation or truce supervision or direct military action, has helped avert or end hostilities in Iran, in Greece, in the Middle East, in Kashmir, in Indonesia, in Korea, at Suez, in Lebanon, in the Congo, and now in West New Guinea.
46. If the United Nations, has not succeeded in bringing the great Powers together, it has often succeeded in keeping them apart —in places where, face-to-face confrontation might have changed difficult situations into impossible situations.
47. If the United Nations has not succeeded in settling all international disputes, it has prepared the way for the peaceful evolution of an international order. In that process, the United Nations has not made the fatal error of trying to freeze the movement of history. It has not sought peace at the expense of needed change. And we must be equally sure that in a world as volatile as our own, change is not sought at the expense of peace, which is needed above all.
48. The record of accomplishment is formidable; but the movement of history is more pre-emptory that ever, and today's challenges of peace and of progress are therefore more urgent than ever. To meet these challenges, we need not just a strong but a still stronger United Nations. The most important general issue before the General Assembly is to get on with the business of steadily improving our Organization so that it can deal ever more energetically, more efficiently and more promptly with the dangers to peace and the obstacles to progress.
49. This is the essence, this is the heart, this is the day-to-day stuff of our duty in this Assembly as we see it: to build mightier mansions, to keep strengthening the United Nations. The worth and the loyalty of the Members will be tested by this standard: do their actions, do their proposals strengthen or weaken our Organization?
50. Strengthening the United Nations involves questions both of structure and of Strategy.
51. So far as structure is concerned, a first necessity is to set the United Nations on, a sound financial basis. Our Organization has today a deficit of more than $150 million —brought about largely by the defaults or delays in payments for peace-keeping operations which have proved as expensive as they were necessary.
52. The emergency plan to meet this deficit through the sale of bonds is good as a stopgap. As a result of action by our Congress, the United States Government will be in a position to lend the United Nations half of what it will borrow under this plan. Other nations have already pledged $73 million. We hope and that is a mild word for it —that these States, along with the nations still unpledged, will bring the total pledged to $100 million. My Government can then use its full authority to match that sum.
53. But this is only a palliative, it is not a solution. The current deficit is a symptom of a deeper problem, a problem created by the inaction of too many of the Governments in this Assembly Hall. One can; understand past reasons for reluctance to accept collective financial responsibility for United Nations actions. Some States for example, doubted whether the General Assembly could legally make a binding assessment for the United Nations peace-keeping expenses. But any legal uncertainties have now been cleared up by the recent opinion of the International Court of Justice.
54. This Assembly now faces the compelling obligation of affirming a policy of collective financial responsibility for the actions of the United Nations. I believe that the Assembly, at this session, should accept and act upon the Advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, as past Assemblies have invariably. accepted and acted upon other advisory opinions. The financial integrity and independence of the United Nations are at stake. But something even more important is at stake: the rule of law. The Court has ruled on the law; it remains to the Assembly to manifest at once its respect and its compliance by converting the law into policy.
55. I believe that the Assembly must also devise a financing plan for future peace-keeping operations to take effect when the proceeds from the bond issue are exhausted. The details of such a plan are open to discussion. But whatever the character of the plan, it should require that every Member meet its obligations when an assessment is duly voted.
56. We A hope that the Assembly will work out a programme, which will finance operations authorized by itself or by the Security Council; otherwise, we doom our Organization to impotence. We cannot expect the United Nations to survive from day to day by passing a cup like a beggar in the street.
57. There are other problems of structure in addition to finance. No one knows better than we in this hall the need to streamline the procedures of this greatly expanded Organization so that it can deal efficiently with the complex business which crowds our long agenda.
58. We must enlarge the Security Council and the Economic and Social Council to assure fair representation to every region of the earth.
59. We must review the rules and practices of our international civil service, particularly in the relation of Member States to the Secretariat, so that the staff of the United Nations remains "exclusively international", as the Charter stipulates.
60. We also must elect unconditionally a Secretary-General for a full term of office. After the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjold last year, the Assembly went through a protracted but instructive constitutional crisis. We resolved this crisis by vindicating —overwhelmingly, and I trust permanently— the integrity of the office of the Secretary-General as established by the Charter. We then selected unanimously as Acting Secretary-General a diplomat of extraordinary personal qualities who, has served this Organization well in a time of transition and uncertainty.
61. Our responsibility in this Assembly is to make sure that this important office is as well filled in the next five years as it has been in the past and that he who holds the office retains the full freedom and authority provided under the Charter.
62. But the solution of all of the problems of organization would still leave unsolved the problem, of how we use the machinery we have devised. I take it that our essential purpose is to find practical means of fulfilling the intentions of the Charter. But I sometimes wonder whether the means adopted are always the best way to achieve the ends desired.
63. I am well aware of the frustrations, the temptations and conflicts in any parliamentary democracy, but it happens to be the best system ever invented, to protect and reconcile all interests in the conduct of public affairs. Given the inherent complexities of this form of organization, given the gravity of the matters with which we deal, given the youth of the United Nations and given its extremely rapid growth; it must be said that the General Assembly, with few exceptions, has conducted itself with surprising responsibility and maturity.
64. Our plain duty is to perform our business in such a way as to make This Assembly even more responsible, even more mature —and therefore more effective.
65. It is clear that the business of this Assembly, cannot be conducted effectively in the manner of a protest demonstration in a public square. It is clear that the influence of this Assembly cannot grow if the quality of its debate is debased by propaganda or by speeches designed not to further the business before the house, but to gratify emotions back home.
66. Indignation and outrage have been powerful enemies of injustice since the beginning of history. It would be surprising if they had no place in the proceedings of the United Nations. But the test of resolutions presented to this Assembly must surely be whether they promise to bring us closer to rational solutions of real problems and thereby closer to justice.
67. For example, I think we must all beware of the resolution which invokes high principle in support of unrealistic action and does nothing to advance a practical solution. If this becomes common practice, we would risk destroying the influence of our Organization, for the value of, its recommendations would depreciate like inflated currency.
68. In the United Nations, all Members, large and small, are juridically equal. This is why it is so often called the hope of the world. This is why it is the greatest guardian of the interests of smaller States. And this is also why, as the Assembly grows in numbers, we must match its size by its sense of relevance and its sense of responsibility.
69. We must also recognize, I think, that open debate under the television cameras is not always conducive to the moderation and to the restraint essential when proud and sovereign States are in dispute. Nor is the Assembly the only means through which our Organization achieves its purpose. We saw a year ago that this Assembly could not agree on how to settle the dispute over West New Guinea. We know today how much the United Nations has been able to accomplish in composing this dispute by entering it as a quiet third partner.
70. I believe that there will be many, opportunities for the United Nations to serve as a "third man" in world affairs, as the objective fact-finder, the impartial "presence", the policeman on the beat, the instrument of quiet-diplomacy. On some issues before us even today, for example, the United Nations might appoint a rapporteur to ascertain the facts and to analyse the problems, and thereby to facilitate sound decisions by the General Assembly.
71. Nothing is more important to all of us than a sustained and systematic attack on the conflicts which threaten the peace. Our World is now a crowded house and our planet a single powder keg. We believe that all nations must stay their hands in pursuit of national ambitions involving conflict with others until the world community has had a chance to find solutions through patient and quiet diplomatic effort.
72. The point here is not to oppose or to postpone desirable, change, the point is not to stall or to evade needed action. On the contrary, the point is precisely to select the most effective technique, to search out the most relevant formula, to ensure that change can in fact take place, that action can in fact be taken to secure the peace of the world and to strengthen the United Nations.
73. There is work enough to do, and there are tools enough to do it. Let us resolve to set about it in an orderly fashion, let us use and combine our tools and techniques for a period of active and inventive diplomacy, let us, at this seventeenth session of the General Assembly, aspire to the highest forms of political art and usher in a time of peaceful solutions of conflict, of peaceful passage, if you please, through the vast transformations which contemporary history demands.
74. The path to peace lies through thickets of conflict. But the biggest obstacle in the path, the most overwhelming danger of all, is the onrushing arms race. Every day it gathers momentum as the nuclear Powers and others, large and small, enlarge their arsenals. Some of us continue to invent and test frightful new weapons. We feel obliged to do this for the sake of our separate national interests at a time in history when the national interest of all nations, those with nuclear weapons and those without, demands not.; the expansion but the abolition of the power to wage war.
75. Let me be as clear and as simple as I can. This prodigal arms race is dangerous and deadly folly. Here in the United States we want to save, not destroy, our fellow man. We want to devote the resources now Swallowed by this insatiable monster to the unfinished tasks of our own society. And we want to devote these resources to giving every soul on earth a chance for a better life.
76. Yet the arms race goes on. It goes on because no nation confronted by hostile, nations can neglect its defences. No great Power can risk unilateral disarmament. There is one way, and one way only, out of this intolerable dilemma, and that is a system of complete and general disarmament under which all nations progressively tear down, in plain view of the international community and with suitable safeguards, their own capacity to wage war.
77. A great achievement of the last session of the General Assembly was to endorse an agreement on a set of principles for general and complete disarmament in a peaceful world. Although we have made some progress, we have not made enough progress toward translating these agreed principles into an agreed plan to move by mutual action in rapid stages toward total disarmament and effective international peace-keeping.
78. The United States has proposed such a plan. It has submitted its proposals to this General Assembly and to the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament at Geneva.
79. But, just as it takes at least two .to make an arms race, it takes at least two to stop an arms race. No one in his senses would expect one side to abandon the means of self-defence unless it knew for sure that the other side was giving up its aims as well. This means that practical verification is the essence of any workable agreement on general disarmament.
80. It need not be total verification. We have demonstrated again and again during long negotiations that we are prepared to take certain risks to lessen the chance of an intensified arms race. But we are not prepared to risk our survival. If other nations permit, as we have agreed to do, the degree of international inspection technically required for mutual security, we can end the arms race. But we cannot stake our national existence on blind trust, especially on blind trust in a great and powerful nation which repeatedly declares its fundamental hostility to the basic values of our free society.
81. The issue is plain. The price of general disarmament is mutual security within the framework, of the United Nations. Because such a security would be by international inspection, it could have no conceivable connexion with espionage. Is inspection by a United Nations agency too high a price to pay for the safety, perhaps the survival, of mankind? Can any society value its secrecy more than everyone's safety, especially a society which avows itself to be the model toward which all other societies must irresistibly evolve?
82. I put this issue in all gravity. I ask the Members of this General Assembly to join the people of the world in demanding a programme of general disarmament which stands a chance of ending the arms race.
83. Once again, the answer to this issue is not to be found in exhortation or in emotionalism. It is not to be found by passing virtuous resolutions which proclaim noble ends without realistic means. It is to be found only in remorseless efforts to solve the infinitely complicated problem of disarmament. We believe that serious negotiations in Geneva will bring us closer to our goal, and I hope the discussions there will continue to have the prayerful and wholehearted support of this General Assembly.
84. Here in New York, the General Assembly can insist on the indispensable condition of world disarmament, the assurance that agreements made are agreements kept.
85. But there is a situation even more immediate, but happily more hopeful, than general disarmament. I refer to the testing of nuclear weapons. If we see in this a more acute problem, let me suggest that it is also more manageable, and therefore offers brighter hopes for early progress.
86. For nearly four years the nuclear Powers, including my country, have been locked in negotiation for a reliable and a permanent ban on the testing of nuclear weapons. From such a ban would come a barrier to the spread of such weapons, an end to this new source of radiation in the human environment, and a great step toward the comprehensive disarmament treaty we so earnestly seek.
87. As is plain from the draft treaties tabled at Geneva, the United States Government is prepared to stop the testing of all nuclear weapons, provided only, that others are prepared to assume the obligation to do the same. Testing in the atmosphere, in the oceans and in space causes radiation. Testing underground does not. We are prepared to stop testing even without any international verification in the atmosphere, in the oceans and in space, because we have national means of detecting testing by others. And we are prepared to stop testing underground —where we do not have our own means of verification-provided an international system is created to assure that others Are doing the same.
88. It may be interesting to Members to know that since 1945, when it began testing, the United States has exploded nuclear, devices with a total yield of about 140 megatons. since 1949, when it began testing, the Soviet Union so far as we can tell by distant instrumentation, has exploded devices with a total yield of approximately 250 megatons. Since the USSR broke the moratorium last fall, its explosions have yielded 200 megatons. Those which the United States was then compelled to undertake have yielded 25 megatons.
89. I repeat that we in this country want to cease testing nuclear weapons. If other nuclear Powers are also willing to make an agreement to cease, the testing will cease. But let there be no doubt about it: the United States prefers a comprehensive treaty banning, all tests in all environments and for all time. On this transcendent issue, we in the United States are in dead earnest.
90. I conclude this portion of my remarks With the thanks of my Government to the eight non-aligned nations for their helpful and constructive efforts to bring about agreement at Geneva.
91. The objective of peace is inseparably intertwined with the objective of progress. As we improve our Organization’s capacity to keep the peace, we also strengthen the United Nations for its other essential tasks: to help; build nations in dignity and freedom; to help liberate humanity from century-old bonds of want and squalor. And, as we build healthy modern societies, we knit stronger the fabric of peace; we reduce the chance that misery and failure will explode into conflict. Thus are peace-keeping and nation-building two sides of the United Nations coin.
92. We who have attended these sessions of the General Assembly have been witnesses to a great historic transformation. In the, years since 1945 —and with the support of this Assembly— we have seen the age of classical colonialism move toward an end. In these years forty-six nations —nearly half of the present membership of this Organization— have gained their independence. This has represented a revolutionary change in the structure of international relations and international power.
93. It has been a change, I need hardly say, which has been enthusiastically welcomed in the United States, As the first modern State to win freedom from colonialism, we have been proud to help other States begin that most precious and most difficult of adventures —the adventure in self-government. We count no task more important than assisting those everywhere, in the older colonial areas and elsewhere, to self-determination.
94. This task will engage the Assembly in grave and determined deliberations in the months ahead. In no part of the world has the movement toward national independence attained more spectacular results in the last three years, as we know, than in Africa. In no part of the world is it more important to make further progress in solving the remaining issues of classical colonialism on the basis of genuine self-determination. For many months, the Special Committee of seventeen members has addressed itself to these issues. We hope that the Committee will be able to conduct its work in the future in an atmosphere undistracted by the emotions of the cold war, which affected its work this year —in an atmosphere where States old and new can work together to help bring into existence in lands not yet free the conditions essential for successful nationhood.
95. For a nation is not created by a stroke of the pen. A declaration of political independence is a beginning; it is not a conclusion. Nothing more discredits the great historic transformation of our epoch than for newly independent States to fall into chaos and become an international problem or an international danger. The long labour of nationhood requires the reality as well as the rhetoric of independence —it requires an emerging national will capable of the political wisdom, the administrative vigour, the economic energy and the moral discipline necessary to convert the promise of national independence into a free and productive life for its people. The interest of my Government and the interest, I dare say, of most of the Members here present, lies not in the mere multiplication of nations, but in the multiplication of nations where people are free, where people have the strength to survive, and to grow and contribute to the vitality of the international order, the world community.
96. Nation-building thus has its political dimension, but national independence has its social and economic and moral dimensions as well. That is. why I hope that this Assembly will devote its attention to the next great item on the agenda of nation-building, that is, helping the new nations fashion the tools to carry put their tasks of self-development.
97. Never has a time been more propitious for the successful discharge of these tasks. If the miracles of science have given Mankind new power to destroy, they have also given mankind new power to create. The challenge which confronts us is to turn the miracles of science to the service of man, and to man the labourer on this earth as well as man the explorer of the universe beyond.
98. We have a right, I think, to congratulate the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on its progress toward international scientific and technical co-operation, progress which holds high promise for both peace and the advancement of knowledge. But what does it profit if a few men orbit the earth while below them millions are starving? What is the point of our technological prowess if it can launch men into space but cannot lift them from the swamps of poverty?
99. To set out consciously to abolish poverty as the prevailing condition of humanity is as formidable a task as man ever set himself, and I would ask Members not to underestimate its difficulties.
100. But if the task is enormously complex, it can also be deeply fulfilling. I am proud that my own country pioneered in offering a helping hand to nations prepared to start along the road towards self-sustaining growth. I am gratified too that so many Of the other industrially developed nations have followed suit. It is heartening that groups of nations are beginning to work out their economic destinies in common through regional organizations, and coordinating their assistance to the emerging nations.
101. Over the years, the United Nations itself has established an impressive range of technical institutions geared to the job of helping the less developed nations to modernize their economies. The United Nations family of agencies is the source of new and exciting projects: a World Food Programme is just getting under way; the Board of Governors of the World Bank is calling at this moment for recommendations on the expansion of capital for the International Development Association; an un-precedented conference on the application of science and technology to the problems of development will be held at Geneva early next year. Other projects and programmes attest to the growing maturity, the expanding scope, and the rising operational capacity of the United Nations family of agencies. This is all to the good.
102. The challenge before us now is to make our United Nations agencies, better with each passing year; to endow them with sound procedures and adequate resources; to staff then with disinterested and expert talent; to improve their planning and programming and administration and co-ordination; to see that they meet the needs of realistic development in the new nations; to integrate then with the other forms of development assistance, national, regional and international, presently going to the emerging nations; and thereby to ensure that development aid will be applied everywhere on a cooperative rather than a competitive basis.
103. We need to produce a closer harmony from the orchestra of aid instruments already available to us.
104. The full promise of development cannot be achieved within national boundaries. To „ stimulate general prosperity, we must remove the barriers which block the free flow of men, money and goods across national frontiers.
105. We have seen the extraordinary burst of economic activity which has attended the evolution of the European Common Market —one of the great adventures in creative statesmanship of our age. Groups of countries in other parts of the world are also seeking ways to build regional economies which in turn can further thrive on expanded world trade. It is essential of course, that such groupings should offer to non-members the fullest possible advantage of the larger market. We know now that one nation cannot buy its prosperity by limiting the prosperity of others.
106. An expanding world trade, built on the scaffolding of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, rests in turn on that further social progress, that larger freedom, that broader structure of international peace which it is the purpose of the United Nations to secure. That is why the United States was pleased to join with its fellow members of the Economic and Social Council, in the unanimous call for a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. We will do everything we can to help this conference to succeed.
107. We need to move, under the challenge of the Development Decade, towards a clearer strategy of development, towards a better sense of priorities towards a sharper division of labour among the various aid institutions, and towards a keener appreciation that the economic and social development of a country is not the result only of outside capital and assistance, but of political leadership, institutional growth, economic and social reform, and national will.
108. Here, then, are our twin tasks: to replace strident politics with quiet but determined, diplomacy, and to replace the arms race, as the President said last year, with a peace race, with a creative race in the production and exchange of goods and the elevation of living standards.
109. These tasks are, not new, nor will they be finished before we adjourn. But before we adjourn I trust that the General Assembly at its seventeenth session will energetically get on with the job of peaceful settlement, of non-violent change, and of war against human want.
110. As the custodians of the history of our times, we can, no do less. To the discharge of these responsibilities; my own Government pledges its firm and unswerving support. Animated by the ideals of the Charter and by our obligations to our fellow men we, the Members of the Assembly, cannot adjourn our deliberations without providing the world with tangible, evidence of our devotion to peace and justice. This tangible evidence can lie only in our decisions and deeds in the months ahead.