At this session we are taking stock of the work of the United Nations over the six years of its existence. The delegation of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic also wishes to express its views on the results of that work.
90. The longing of the peoples for a firm and durable peace is a characteristic of our era, and we should therefore ask ourselves how far the United Nations has succeeded in discharging its duties under the Charter.
91. We are compelled to answer frankly that the United Nations has failed to justify the hopes and expectations of the peoples of the whole world, who want a lasting peace, the development and strengthening of international cooperation and the promotion of trade, economic co-operation and social progress. The policy of strengthening international co-operation on a basis of respect for the independence and sovereign equality of nations has not been carried out in the United Nations.
92. International developments during the last year fully confirm the profound political analysis of the work of the United Nations made by Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, head of the Soviet Government.
93. In an interview on 17 February 1951 with a correspondent of Pravda, J. V. Stalin said: “The United Nations, established as a stronghold of peace, is being transformed into a weapon of war and an instrument for launching a new world war... Thus, the United Nations is following in the inglorious tracks of the League of Nations, thereby destroying its own moral authority and bringing about its own downfall
94. International events during the past year have fully confirmed these words. The entire work of the United Nations — in which the Anglo-American bloc is the directing nucleus — over the past year testifies to the incessant efforts of the Anglo-American bloc to undermine the principle of the equal rights of States.
95. Conversely, the delegation of the Byelorussian SSR and those other delegations friendly to our point of view have endeavoured to preserve the principle of the equal fights of States, and to maintain general peace and security throughout the world. Surely it should be the duty of the United Nations to ensure equality, peace and friendship among the nations, on a basis of mutual trust and cooperation, rather than help to make the present international situation worse.
96. Their stubborn refusal to replace the representatives of the Kuomintang-Chiang Kai-shek clique in the Security Council and the other United Nations organs by the true representatives of the lawful government of the People’s Republic of China demonstrates that the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the States supporting them have no desire for co-operation and the strengthening of the United Nations.
97. The United Nations radio station broadcasts open reactionary war propaganda. The broadcasts are imbued with a spirit of hysteria and provocation inimical to the cause of peace.
98. The representative of the Kuomintang has to this day not been excluded from the United Nations and no offer of the membership which it deserves has as yet been made to the true representative of the Government of the Chinese nation — the representative of the Chinese People’s Government.
99. On 8 November [335th plenary meeting] we heard Mr. Acheson’s statement. He attempted to conceal the aggressive plans of United States foreign policy behind phrases about peace and the regulation, limitation and reduction of armaments and armed forces. While these proposals were made with the alleged intention of strengthening the peace, Mr. Acheson did everything in his power to sidetrack this session and to divert its attention from the real reduction of armaments and armed forces and the prohibition of atomic weapons.
100. Speaking of Korea, Mr. Acheson and certain representatives of other countries distorted the facts by stating that the aggression had come from the North Korean side. It is well known, however, that the act of aggression was committed on 25 June 1950 by the South Korean forces against the Korean People’s Democratic Republic in accordance with a plan worked out in advance with the American General Staff. This fact is confirmed by a map showing the strategic plan of attack against North Korea, with exact details of the direction of the main blows against the People’s Army, which was discovered among the archives of the Syngman Rhee Government in Seoul and published by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. It is corroborated by a large number of documents which show that preparations for aggression against the Korean People’s Democratic Republic were being made by the Syngman Rhee puppet clique under the direction of American generals and government politicians. Armed intervention by American forces in the civil war in Korea continues to this day.
101. These facts show that it is the United States which prepared and launched aggression in Korea. Mr. Acheson and his adherents need this talk of North Korean aggression in order to justify intervention by American forces in Korea. Mr. Acheson also stated that since July the United Nations command in Korea had been conducting negotiations with a view to concluding an armistice, but that so far no success had been achieved.
102. All the world knows that the Kaesong talks on a ceasefire and armistice in Korea have frequently been interrupted owing to the provocative acts of the Americans. A careful analysis of the course of the Kaesong talks leads to the conclusion that the main objective of American ruling circles has been to hoodwink world public opinion by their assumed love of peace.
103. Mr. Acheson passed over in silence the atrocities and cruelties systematically perpetrated on the Korean people by the American interventionists. He was also silent with regard to their flagrant violations of the principles of humanity and international law laid down in The Hague and Geneva international conventions on the rules of war. The extermination of the Korean people is to this day being carried out by the systematic destruction of Korean towns and villages and the use against women and children of the most inhuman methods of destruction, such as incendiary and napalm bombs. In the territories occupied by American forces tens of thousands of completely innocent peaceful citizens are being bestially murdered without trial or investigation.
104. Every honest man and woman in the world protests in anger and indignation against the atrocities perpetrated by the American forces in Korea and demands the immediate termination of the Korean war.
105. In his speech Mr. Acheson actively defended the proposal put forward by the United Kingdom, the United States of America and France entitled “Regulation, limitation and balanced reduction of all armed forces and alt armaments” [A/1943], and declared that it represented a new matter of great urgency and importance.
106. The delegation of the Byelorussian SSR has carefully studied the proposals, and also the explanations which Mr. Acheson gave in his speech. The proposals do not provide for any real reduction of armaments, nor do they provide for the prohibition of atomic weapons. The main point in the three-Power proposals for regulation, limitation and balanced reduction of all armed forces and armaments is the introduction of disclosure and verification, to be carried out in successive stages with the object of revealing data concerning armed forces and armaments, including atomic weapons.
107. Thus, genuine reduction of armed forces and armaments are to be replaced by a census of the armaments and armed forces existing in individual States, while the question of the prohibition of atomic weapons is completely ignored.
108. For the moment the three-Power proposals envisage only a study of this “programme”, while its implementation is to be postponed until the end of the war in Korea and until the principal political problems dividing the various States have been settled.
109. No mention is made in the three-Power proposals of the task of preventing aggression. Why is there no reference in the proposals to the prohibition of the use of poison gas and of bacteriological weapons in a future war?
110. Why is it now necessary to confine activities to the collection of information relating to the most simple types of armaments? Who will determine the reliability of such information? It is possible at any moment to question data received and to refuse to recognize any given census.
111. Explaining the three-Power proposals, Mr. Acheson stated [335th plenary meeting] that “That system of disclosure and verification must be a system which progresses from stage to stage as each one is completed”. The question naturally arises as to who will determine when a given stage has in fact been completed. If, for instance some United States Senate committee is not satisfied with the result of the work performed at one stage or another, it will prove impossible to realize the plan for reducing armaments and armed forces.
112. Mr. Acheson was unable to explain when and by •what method the possible reduction of armed forces and armaments could be carried out; on the contrary, he made a reduction of armaments depend on a whole series of reservations and preliminary conditions.
113. Everyone is aware that progressive humanity has for six years already been waging a stubborn struggle for the prohibition -of atomic weapons, weapons for the mass annihilation of human beings. The USSR delegation has on a number of occasions brought up the question of the need to prohibit atomic weapons and to establish international control over this prohibition. But the delegation of the United States of America, with the assistance of its voting machine in the United Nations, has systematically disrupted the implementation of this just demand of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population.
114. Mr. Acheson is again insisting that the basis of work on the atomic question should be the notorious Baruch-Acheson-Lilienthal Plan, the object of which is to subject all sources of nuclear fuel and all atomic production in every country to United States control.
115. And now, in the allegedly “new” proposals for “stages”, the attempt is being made as before to find a substitute for and retard real concrete work on the urgent task of elaborating practical measures for prohibiting and controlling atomic weapons. All measures are directed towards preventing any move for the prohibition of the manufacture of atomic weapons and any effective international control.
116. Under the cover of such noisy talk, work on the expansion and construction of new factories for the production of atomic bombs is continuing, as is the accumulation of atomic weapons.
117. Thus, according to a statement by a correspondent of the newspaper New York Post, Allen, dated 9 October 1950, the sum of 8,000 million dollars was allocated in 1950 to meet the programme for the stockpiling of atomic weapons. After accumulating stocks of atomic bombs and producing new types of atomic weapons, the ruling circles of the United States of America intend to use them in the war now being prepared by the Anglo-American bloc against the countries in the camp of peace.
118. At the same time as Mr. Acheson advocates a census and inventory of all armaments, including atomic weapons, with the professed objective of achieving subsequent disarmament on the basis of the three-Power proposals, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Bradley, speaks of the necessity for a considerable further increase in the armaments of the United States of America. Speaking on 9 November of this year at the American Petroleum Institute, Bradley stated that the American Chiefs of Staff had decided that it was essential for the United States to make a considerable increase in its air forces and that the effort in that direction should be undertaken immediately.
119. An important place in this atomic general’s speech was occupied by the question of using atomic weapons for aggressive purposes, and Ire declared that aviation continued to be the best method for the use of atomic power on the field of battle and in the heart of the territory of any large country.
120. Bradley’s statement bears witness to the real intentions of the United States ruling circles. Mr. Acheson attempts to hide such aggressive aspirations of the American imperialists behind hypocritical talk about the reduction of armaments.
121. The delegation of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic considers that the General Assembly should lend its ear to the voice of many millions of people in every country of the world, and should reach a decision, in accordance. with the demands and desires of all peoples, for the prohibition of atomic weapons and for the establishment of strict international control over its observance.
122. The representative of Canada, Mr. Pearson, in his speech at the 339th meeting of the General Assembly held on 12 November, stated, in the anti-Soviet tone usual with, him, that the speech of the head of the USSR delegation, A. Y. Vyshinsky, was only propaganda and alleged that “ the Russian Government has now decided to abandon the effort (for peace) completely and to use the United Nations not for the removal of differences, but merely to vilify, to sneer at and to attack those with whom it disagrees ”.
123. It would be scarcely necessary to dwell upon Mr. Pearson’s speech were it not for the fact that its slanderous inventions were broadcast from the rostrum of the General Assembly. It is well known that the Soviet. Union, faithful to its policy of peace, has ceaselessly carried on a struggle for the prevention of war and for the preservation of peace throughout the world.
124. At the five preceding sessions of the General Assembly, at the sessions of the Security Council and of other United Nations bodies, the USSR delegation has repeatedly submitted concrete proposals to ensure peace throughout the world. Representatives at the General Assembly are acquainted with the USSR proposals for the reduction of the armed forces of the five great Powers by one-third, for the prohibition of atomic weapons, for the conclusion of a peace pact between the five great Powers, and other proposals. But these peaceful proposals of the USSR have been systematically rejected by the Anglo-American majority in the United Nations, and today, Mr. Acheson and his friends represent themselves as inveterate peace-mongers. These gentlemen are very eloquent about peace, but at the same time they are carrying on preparations for a new world war, establishing land, sea and air military bases in foreign territory and attempting to intimidate peace-loving nations.
125. They do not wish to reduce armaments. They have a deadly fear of an agreement on this matter since a reduction of armaments might undermine their aggressive plans and render unnecessary the armaments race which is raising the profits of the monopolists by thousands of millions.
126. Some speakers have objected to the conclusion of a peace pact between the five great Powers, alleging that we have a peace pact between sixty nations in the Charter of the United Nations. It is well known, however, that the main responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security throughout the world is borne by the five Powers which are permanent members of the Security Council, who have the greatest authority, weight and influence in settling all international affairs. Everyone knows that a peace pact between the United States, the USSR, the United Kingdom, France and the People’s Republic of China would avert the threat of war and would save humanity from the burden of inflated war budgets and the armaments race.
127. Such a pact would be an adequate foundation for a universal agreement and for the peace and security of nations, and any objection to the proposal for the peace pact is clearly worthless. It might play an extremely positive part in preventing a new war and in establishing friendly relations between nations.
128. I cannot refrain from dwelling in my statement on the insulting and slanderous statements made by the representative of Yugoslavia, Mr. Kardelj, against the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies.
129. The representative of Tito’s Yugoslavia made a slanderous attempt to distort the facts and to decry the achievements of the Soviet army, which liberated the peoples of Yugoslavia from the Hitlerite occupation. But no slanderous fabrications and no base insinuations can erase from the memory of the Yugoslav people their recollections of the great part played by the Soviet army in their liberation.
130. The Yugoslav people hold sacred the memory of the days of their country’s liberation from the yoke of the Hitlerite occupation. Renegades and those who have crossed over to the imperialist camp have always shown the greatest hatred for those whom they deserted.
131. I shall not dwell on the slanderous allegations made by Mr. Kardelj concerning the peace pact which, he alleges, is directed against the interests of small countries. That is an unworthy fabrication, an evil slander of the bankrupt Tito clique.
132. In that connexion I should like to draw attention to the following fact: today’s issue of the newspaper Parisien Libere states that Tito and the United States Ambassador at Belgrade, George Allen, have signed an agreement on the conditions of military aid to Yugoslavia by the United States of America. The agreement provides, in particular, that a commission of advisers, an American commission, will be set up in Belgrade to supervise the use of the war material supplied to Yugoslavia.
133. This fact shows that, in the plans of the North Atlantic bloc, Tito’s Yugoslavia is being given the part of an instrument of aggression against the people’s democracies and the Soviet Union.
134. To disguise its traitorous, anti-democratic policy and its defection to the aggressor's camp, and to deceive the Yugoslav people, the Tito clique is resorting to slander against the Soviet Union and the people's democracies.
135. The Titoists’ efforts are in vain. No one can deceive the peoples of the world, who are fully aware that the Soviet Union is pursuing a policy of peace and friendship between nations, that it has never threatened anyone and does not threaten anyone and that it heads the camp of peace, whereas the United States of America heads the camp of war and aggression to which the Tito clique has now crossed over by becoming a tool of the American imperialists and aggressors.
136. I need not dwell on that point any longer.
137. As is known, the Soviet Union, from the first days of its existence, has unremittingly and consistently pursued a policy of peace, has continually defended anti still defends the cause of peace and has pursued a policy of co-operation with all countries desiring such co-operation. The peaceful policy of the Soviet Union corresponds fully to the wishes and aspirations of all peace-loving nations.
138. The Second World War, which was prepared and unleashed by Fascist Germany and imperialistic Japan and which claimed so many victims, has taught peace-loving peoples many lessons. Naturally, those peoples do not wish to shed any more blood for the benefit of millionaires and multi-millionaires, and are therefore uniting in the struggle for the maintenance of peace and against fascism and war. Small wonder that the great movement in defence of peace has so rapidly won over the population of the whole world and has united hundreds of millions of people of all countries under the flag of the struggle for world peace.
139. These anti-war movements of peoples were reflected at the most recent session of the World Peace Council at Vienna, which adopted an appeal to the United Nations, urging that the United Nations should adopt concrete proposals for the maintenance of peace and re-establishment of confidence among States.
140. We must heed the voices of hundreds of millions of people who are demanding the maintenance of peace. They insistently demand that the peace pact should be concluded between the five great Powers which bear the main responsibility for the maintenance of peace throughout the world. We have to admit that these demands are legitimate and that they express the fervent wish of the peoples to maintain world peace.
141. The Byelorussian people, which suffered all the honors of the Second World War, longs for peace and all the adult population of Byelorussia therefore signed the appeal of the World Peace Council for the conclusion of a peace pact between the five great Powers. The Byelorussian people unanimously approves the peaceful foreign policy of the Government of the USSR, which unremittingly struggles for peace and defends the cause of peace throughout the world.
142. The delegation of the Byelorussian SSR wholeheartedly supports the proposals of the Soviet Union [A/1944] as expressed by the head of the USSR delegation, Andrei Yanuaryevich Vyshinsky, at the 336th plenary meeting of the General Assembly on 8 November this year. It is a fact that the recent aggravation of the international situation has caused anxiety and disquiet to peace-loving people throughout the world. Every honest man hopes that the five great Powers responsible for world peace should begin negotiations and reach agreement as soon as possible. The General Assembly should call upon the five great Powers to conclude a peace pact and to combine their efforts in achieving this great aim.
143. The General Assembly should call upon the governments of all States, both Members of the United Nations and States that are not as yet Members, to consider the question of the effective reduction of armed forces and armaments at a world conference. The General Assembly should acknowledge that it is essential for the participants in the military action in Korea to cease such action without delay, to conclude a truce and to withdraw all troops from the 38th parallel within ten days; moreover, all foreign troops and foreign volunteer detachments should be withdrawn from Korea within three months.
144. The sixth session of the General Assembly should declare incompatible with membership in the United Nations any participation in the aggressive Atlantic bloc and the establishment by certain States, especially the United States of America, of military, naval and air bases on foreign territory.
145. These proposals represent a new proof of the peaceful intentions of the Soviet Union, which maintains its triumphant progress. These proposals clearly reflect the sincere aspirations of the peoples that have suffered all the horrors of the Second World War for the maintenance of a lasting and stable peace.
146. The delegation of the Byelorussian SSR calls upon representatives to the sixth session of the General Assembly of the United Nations to adopt these proposals. By doing so, we would be fulfilling our duty of achieving and maintaining world-wide peace and security.