104 



United States ""athwart of the veto power." for war, the ulti- 

 mate penalty, might be necessary. * * * Penalties means im- 

 mediate punishment and elimination of any veto of it. * * * 

 As for the warning elements in the plan, the American people 

 should know how little it amounted to. 124 



Eventually, Baruch obtained approval from President Truman of 

 both the idea of sanctions and the provision that the veto power of the 

 Security Council would not apply to the decision to administer them. 

 Two days before the opening of the UNAEC, Baruch briefed the Sen- 

 ate Special Committee on Atomic Energy on the U.S. proposals, and 

 the members appeared to welcome the plan approved by the 

 President. 1 -"' 



U.S. POLICY ON THE VETO : ITS RELATION TO ENFORCEMENT 



Because U.S. policy on the veto over sanctions was a principal target 

 of Soviet opposition, and a major hindrance in the negotiations, a 

 discussion of this question might be useful to an understanding of the 

 principal issues of this study. It should be noted that the principle 

 of unanimity — that is, the veto power — among the permanent mem- 

 bers of the Security Council on security matters had been a contro- 

 versial issue during negotiation of the U.N. Charter. Strong U.S. sup- 

 port for the veto power has been explained as follows : 



* * * The Western powers * * * realized that the veto privi- 

 lege placed a premium on inaction at precisely the most criti- 

 cal point of great-power disagreement. Long and fruitless ef- 

 forts were therefore made by American experts * * * to de- 

 vise some method of decisionmaking on security issues that 

 would allow the Council to override the negative vote of at 

 least one permanent member. All such formulae, however, 

 collapsed before the dominating political fact that the ad- 

 ministration was not prepared to allow American armed 

 forces to be ordered into some unknown future military action 

 without U.S. consent. Even had Executive officials felt less 

 strongly on the question, they would never have assumed that 

 Congress could be persuaded to relinquish so much authority 

 to an untried international organization. 1 -" 



Thus, the policy of the United States on the veto, as it applied to 

 the question of enforcement of atomic energy control, represented a 

 significant departure from its earlier policy on the veto within the 

 general framework of the United Nations. Although the question of 

 sanctions and its relationship with the veto power was primarily a 

 political matter, a number of technological factors associated with 

 atomic energy control may have influenced the United States in its 

 policy decisions on these subjects. 



This change in US. policy was probably attributable to the nature 

 of atomic weapons and the destructive force which they represented to 

 policymakers, a perception epitomized in Baruch's opening address to 

 the [TNAEC: 



Science has torn from nature a secret so vast in its poten- 

 tialities that our minds cower from the terror it creates. Yet 



121 Ibid., pp. .-,7.", 574. 

 '=■'• [bid., pp. 565 574 



120 Emphasis added, itnth B. Russell, The United Nations <m<l United States Security 

 Policy. (Washington, D.C. : Brookings, 1968), i>. 51. 



