WORLD COHESION

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 227, 24 August 1945, Page 5

WORLD COHESION

EFFECT OF NEW WARFARE

POWER REDISTRIBUTED. RUGBY, Aug. 23. The resolution moved by Mr Attlee in tlie House of Commons that the United Nations Charter be ratified by Britain forms the subject of most of the leading articles in the London newspapers. Comment takes tlie form of an appreciation of the world position in the light of recent events and discoveries.

The Times says: “New developments of warfare, culminating in a new d.stribution of world power and in the coming of the atomic bomb, have given the new organisation a universality to which the old League of Nations aspired but never really attained. Tne supreme test 'of its ethcacy is as likely to come in Asia as in Europe, in the Pacific as in the Atlantic, 'the same cogent reason deprives the smaller nations of the right of veto which the unanimity rule of the Covenant conferred on them. The irrefutable lesson of experience proves that, save for altogether exceptional circumstances, they are inextricably involved in the fortunes of their larger neighbours, and must, within the limit oi their resources, play an active co-oper-ative part in the business of security. “The new Charter makes no attempt to define aggression or to lay down rules by which tlie action of member States may be adjudged legitimate or illegitimate. The weight of responsibility for decisions rests on the more or less unfettered discretion of the Security Council, in which the authority of the principal nations will necessarily remain predominant, since they alone possess the power of enforcement—a fact which explains and justifies the veto on such action accorded them in the Charter. The mandate of the Security Council is no longer to sit in judgment, but to take action in any situation which appears to it to threaten the maintenance of peace and security throughout the world.”

The Daily Telegraph says: “Whether it will altogether prevent war no one, as Viscount Cranborne said in the House of Lords, can he certain, but it certainly does provide a means by which war can be prevented if the nations of the world are willing to prevent it.

“All nations, even the strongest, have been taught in those grim six years that none can stand secure alone. Territorial and political security are unobtainable without economic security, and no nation, however great its resources, can now he prosperous apart from the rest of the world. We are all members one of another. “Through the spirit and principles which form the United Nations Charter, tlie world may hasten its approach to that general welfare which alone can ensure the victory w»n by the men who fought and died for it.”