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obedient too] " of the " military circles " of the United States and the United Kingdom. After defending the Soviet Union's attitude in the cases where it had applied the veto, Mr Gromyko claimed that the struggle against the principle of unanimity was a manifestation of the Anglo-American policy of " building up military and political groups to be used in the new war which is being hatched by the Anglo-American bloc." The establishment of the Western Union had revealed that the Anglo-American policy was to form blocs of States directed against the Soviet Union and the " peoples' democracies," since its founders from the very start excluded the possibility that the Soviet Union might be a party to it. The formation of a new military and political alliance with a wider membership and objectives no less aggressive—namely, the North Atlantic Treaty—was now being witnessed. It was obvious that this new bloc was directed against the Soviet Union, since the latter was the only Great Power in the area which was excluded, and since, furthermore, the treaty was not designed to prevent a renewal of German aggression. Again, the pact could not be justified as a regional arrangement of the kind permitted by either Article 51 or Article 52 of the United Nations Charter; it contradicted the purposes and objectives of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of 1942 and the FrancoSoviet Treaty of 1944 ; its aims included interference in the internal affairs of other countries; and its signatories were taking widespread military measures—including plans for the utilization of the atom bomb and for the establishment of an extensive network of military bases —which could not be justified on defence grounds. It was no accident that this bloc had been organized outside the United Nations, because the ruling circles of the United States and the United Kingdom had reverted to the old policy of isolating the Soviet Union ; the pursuit of such actions was impossible in the Security Council, where the concurrence of all the Great Powers was required to adopt decisions on all important questions involved in the maintenance of peace. The struggle upon the question of the' veto was a struggle between the two tendencies in international politics : the tendency to isolate the Soviet Union, to unleash a new war, on the one hand, and the tendency to uphold the basic principles of the United Nations, to frustrate the aggressors, to unmask the war mongers, on the other. The representatives of the other Eastern European States were equally violent in attacking the North Atlantic Treaty, Dr KatzSuchy (Poland) even going so far as to liken the treaty to the RomeBerlin Axis, which also had been styled a defensive alliance only. The representative of the United Kingdom, Mr Hector McNeil, expressed surprise that Mr Gromyko had chosen to introduce, ih violent and aggressive fashion, such irrelevancies into the debate on the veto ;