Attempting to leave behind
seven year carnage of the world war, ambassadors from 51 nations met in
London on January 10, 1946, for the first session of the United Nations
General Assembly. The UN was a body dedicated to preventing future global
conflict, replacing the ineffective and discredited League of Nations.
The idea for a new international
peace keeping organization was first raised in 1941 by President Roosevelt
and Churchill, and was supported by the other Allies the following year,
in the Declaration by United Nations. In the Moscow Declaration of 1943,
China, Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union affirmed
the need to replace the League of Nations, and at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference
in 1944, diplomats from those four countries drew up a proposal. A charter
was drawn up by delegates from 50 nations and ratified (approved) later
in the year. It called for a dominant body, a General Assembly of all
members, as well as a "Security Council", composed of eleven
members (five of them – China, France, Britain, the United States, and
the USSR - permanent). The Security Council alone had authority to intervene
in international disputes, only after full votes of support by its permanent
members.
The Secretariat, led by the
secretary general (the first was Norwegian statesman Trygve Lie, foreign
minister of Norway’s wartime government-in-exile), carries out the UN’s
businesses. At the invatition of the US Congress, the UN located permanently
in New York City. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., using his family’s inexhaustible
fortune, donated prime Manhattan real estates along the East River. By
1952, the main headquarters buildings were completed on the international
land (owned by no country).
