40th anniversary of the United Nations - 20 September 1985

I caught myself just in time. I was going to begin, without explanation, with a phrase which was a steady favourite of Mr Gromyko in his nearly 40 years of speech-making before the United Nations.

It may well be a Russian idiom to which we have no counterpart. The phrase is this, “As is well known...”. It always preceded a downright statement which was meant to be taken as a statement of fact but was actually an outrageous statement of non-fact.

For instance, using the same technique I could say “As is well known, Adolf Hitler was a British spy.” I shall vary this opening and say, "As is well known, the most populous and famous of the five boroughs that compose New York City is Manhattan and Manhattan is an island". The only difference here is that it’s true. I mentioned it in case anyone listening anywhere is unaware of Manhattan Island.

Well, the lengthy island is bordered by two highways, one running alongside the Hudson River on the west and on the east side, a highway officially called Franklin D Roosevelt Drive but known to all inhabitants as the East River Drive.

If you enter the city from the north and have business on the east side you inevitably take the East River Drive to the exit nearest your business. Down in the lower forties and fronting on the East River are the buildings of the United Nations. About three weeks ago a big sign went up arching the highway somewhere up around 100th Street. It said “All commercial vehicles, including vans, are prohibited south of the 96th street exit.”

The explanation given by cab drivers was that the city was trying to work on a stretch of highway that’s showing signs of wear and tear or bursting in the heat and cracking in the cold since it’s been there for nearly 50 years. However in following that driveway down to 42nd Street, I have seen no construction crews at work.

This week another, more plausible, reason emerged and the word "van" is a clue to it. In New York City there is a local definition. A van is a small truck with no windows on the side and that is cause for arrest in a van driver who, going north say out of the city, stays on the East River Drive as it turns into the Grand Central Parkway.

Now a parkway is a motorway on which commercial vehicles are not allowed, as distinct from an expressway or a freeway on which every sort of vehicle can run. Well, the sudden prohibition of vans along the main stretch of the East River Drive is a sinister reminder that a van with no side windows might enclose more things than furniture or horses, as witness the van that drove through the United States marine compound in Lebanon.

In short, it seems most likely that the van ban was decided on because this week the United Nations opens its doors to the representatives of its 159 member nations. The underground entrance to the United Nations garage is immediately off the East River Drive and the policing of that garage and all its entrances and exits was this week only the most conspicuous act in a security exercise the like of which New York City’s police have never before attempted.

The United Nations, having more or less ignored the 40th anniversary of the opening of the founding conference in April 1945 in San Francisco and the June signing of the charter there is making up for it by an elaborate commemoration of its 40th birthday in the annual convening of the General Assembly.

It opened on Tuesday and during the general debate of the next three weeks close to 100 heads of government are expected to appear and speechify, including those heads of government who are also heads of state like King Hussein or, for that matter, President Reagan.

Well, back to the East River and the tremendous to-do that is being made of the 40th General Assembly. With, as I say, nearly 100 heads of state and/or government coming here, including such characters as Colonel Gaddafi and Fidel Castro and Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, the security precautions are inflicting a thundering headache on the New York police.

There are certainly a score or more, perhaps as many as 50 heads of government, who while being routinely controversial at home in the sense that they face an opposition party in daily debate are actually, once they appear in New York, controversial in the sense that some group, some ethnic or national society, is going to feel compelled to march the streets and protest their presence.

Since New York contains – and contain is now a police problem – contains well over 100 different ethnic groups there is always somebody, some small dedicated army, ready at an hour’s notice to heckle and chant and, if sufficiently aroused, to throw things.

Mrs Thatcher, for example, has her critics but I don’t imagine she needs iron-clad protection on the streets of London, but I’m sure she’s quite used to it by now. The day she appears here to make her speech before the United Nations there is bound to be a boisterous Irish contingent out on the sidewalk across the street from the United Nations enclosure. I say “across the street” because the sidewalk that edges the United Nations is part of the UN’s 16 acres that constitute an international zone.

Across the street and step on to the opposite sidewalk and you are immediately in New York City again and peaceful demonstration – peaceable assembly is what the American Constitution calls it – peaceable assembly is a right guaranteed to all citizens.

Well, on Tuesday, the opening day of the assembly, 26 separate protesting groups were marching and shouting and carrying banners for such obvious causes as more sanctions against South Africa, down with Castro, right-to-lifers, pro- and anti- the Sandinistas, pro-Arabs, anti-Arabs, advocates of the release of Russian dissidents and it would not be safe to bet against the appearance sometime of New Zealanders heckling the French and an Argentine posse protesting British sovereignty over the Falklands.

On the first day the police thought that a mere 26 protesting groups were easily handlable. There will certainly be groups protesting the United States’ decision to reduce its contribution to the United Nations budget down to 20% of the whole, as also groups who would like the United Nations to fall and sink in the East River.

Forty years ago, 50 nations gathered in San Francisco and set up as the UN’s main punitive body, the body able to take action, a security council with five permanent members – the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and China. Since then, the China that was thought of as one of the five great powers of the earth is now the embattled Republic of Taiwan. It was expelled by the assembly in 1971 in favour of Communist China.

There are now 159 nations and 15 of them are members of the security council and they have, some time or other, signed the charter which means that they signed a crucial article, Article 43, which alone gave the United Nations not only the authority but a power that would be stronger than any combination of powerful members.

Now this had not been done by the League of Nations and way back there in 1945 we were all very gung-ho about the prospects of the UN as an actual international force guarding the peace. What did Article 43 say and what happened to it? It said that member nations, all member nations, would undertake to make available to the security council on its call, and in accordance with a special agreement and agreements, armed forces, assistance and facilities including rites of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.

The UN was not setting up its own standing army, navy, air force, but under article 43 it would have them on immediate call. The UN could say we want so many air squadrons from you, infantry from you, battleships from you, all the weapons we need etc etc.

Even before the UN was set up a preparatory commission was working on the sort of quotas of men and arms that could be expected from the big and little nation members. Splendid. At last, an international organisation had moved to create a force that could exert the authority it claimed and there was one practical down-to-earth phrase at the end of Article 43. It said, and it was written and signed by all the 1945 members, these agreements were to be negotiated as soon as possible.

Well, those agreements have never been negotiated in 40 years. The UN has, of course, many times requested contributions of men and materiel to form standby or emergency United Nations peacekeeping forces, but it has not and never has had that great over-riding army on call, so not since 1950 and Korea has it been able to order punitive action.

The Russians happened not to be in New York then and so could not veto a decision of the security council. They have never been away since. In the beginning we of the west thought the United Nations was going splendidly because the United States, the UK, France could count on our satellites, western Europe, Scandinavia, all of Central and South America to vote our way. The Russians thought this was awful and slapped their veto on council resolutions with almost automatic monotony.

Today about two-thirds of the nations vote more or less automatically against us and with the Soviet Union. So we in our turn have come to save face or positive action by slapping down our veto, and so the United Nations remains the only sounding board for every nation’s propaganda.

As an actually superior international peace force it was strangled in its cradle the day the first 50 members chose not to negotiate an arms agreement, not as soon as possible, not in 40 years.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.