The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Government for The Upper Air The other evening, a little, bald-headed chap rose in a meeting in my home town of Wilmington and asked: "Who gave Sputnik a license...
...The authority and facilities to issue such reports places an enormous power in the hands of the United Nations...
...Our Congress will naturally balk at all-out cooperation as long as our delegation has no more power than that of Honduras...
...The only sure way to avoid this unhappy possibility is to have the United Nations take possession in the name of mankind...
...The changes which they discuss are those which are already being made or which can be made...
...Think how the isolationists of those days will squirm...
...It is a cogent question—and the very next day I came upon a book which pointed the way to an answer...
...This commission proposes "at least 2,000 volunteers on active duty, plus a larger number of men in trained contingents committed specifically to the organization by member states...
...The authors of this book, most of whom have been sitting in on UN affairs from the start, open their discussion with this sentence: "The United Nations was designed for an age that is rapidly passing away...
...Nothing the Russians say can have any weight against these revelations...
...above the limit agreed upon, authority must rest with the human race, which owns the world...
...But conditions and the number of parties concerned change so rapidly that these are inevitably unsatisfactory...
...Working for peaceful settlements and against all coercion and oppression, the UN has discovered a potent instrument in the power of investigation...
...If a nation's authority is limited to three or twelve miles from the shoreline, it must come to an end at some point up in the air...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Government for The Upper Air The other evening, a little, bald-headed chap rose in a meeting in my home town of Wilmington and asked: "Who gave Sputnik a license to fly over the state of Delaware...
...If there is no rule about this matter, there soon will be...
...But the most exciting sections of this volume deal with three areas which are practically crying out for international sovereignty...
...It is called Strengthening the United Nations and was written by about a hundred experts who for ten years or so have been working together in the Commission for the Study of the Organization of Peace...
...Hitherto, these things have been inadequately controlled by way of multilateral agreements...
...The great continent of Antarctica, of vast scientific importance and almost certainly the depository of great natural wealth, lies down there at the South Pole waiting for community control...
...But they are no dreamers...
...But this body is now withering...
...But most exciting of all in this book is the discussion of outer space...
...coal or other wealth that lies beneath the tight-frozen soil...
...And, especially, they have no illusions about the Russians...
...Every problem, every proposal is discussed in terse and illuminating terms...
...There is so much important stuff packed into this volume that I cannot pretend to give any summary of it...
...It is published by Harper and costs three dollars in the paperback edition...
...Even such a tiny force, experience shows, can exercise a mighty influence in trouble spots or along threatened borders...
...This committee appointed by the General Assembly examined 111 witnesses and inspected endless documents...
...Since the waters of the seas, including the straits, are used by nearly all nations, it is natural to expect them to be controlled through the agreement of all—that is, through the United Nations...
...Soon there will be—if we have statesmen big enough and brave enough— United Nations control of the farther spaces...
...When you read its report, you know that >011 are getting the true picture...
...They all keep realities in sharp focus...
...The impact of this activity received dramatic demonstration through the recent report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary...
...New Zealand, it seems, has made a beginning in the direction of a national claim by establishing Ross Dependency and issuing celebratory postage stamps...
...For example, there is a sharp discussion of the one-country-one-vole system of representation in the General Assembly...
...And, since the General Assembly is more and more taking over the power, it is imperative that its system of representation be revised so as to have some relation to reality...
...The first of these is the sea, including the fisheries, the shipping and the wealth of the ocean beds beyond national limits...
...And then, in the course of time, interplanetary law...
...Any reader who wants to know what these men and women have to say can go to the bookstore and buy a copy...
...In the Charter, the intention was to compensate for this at least partly by the composition of the Security Council...
...If the United States, the USSR and other countries follow suit, we may have a really cold war down there for the sake of establishing weather stations or getting possession of the oil...
...The 10th UN General Assembly proposed holding a Charter Review Conference at some future date...
...After what happened in the Middle East last year, it is inevitable that many should be thinking of the uses of a permanent UN Police Force...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 45
