UNP files, lot 59 D 237, “Membership”
Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, by the Deputy Director of the Office of United Nations Political and Security Affairs (Popper)
- Subject:
- Membership
Mr. Stein telephoned at 4:30 p.m. to say that Belaunde of Peru is pressing the idea of setting up a negotiating committee of five UN Members on the problem of admission of new members to the UN. The [Page 967] Committee would be instructed to approach all groups and all major powers, with a view to working out a political solution to the membership problem.
Realizing that the Committee could only be a source of annoyance and inconvenience to us, Mr. Stein wondered how strongly we felt that Belaunde should be talked out of his idea. He pointed out that we had dissuaded Belaunde from pressing to a vote last year his resolution seeking a legal solution for the membership problem. Now, therefore, Belaunde was interested in political methods.
I said I believed a good deal would depend on how strongly Belaunde felt that he must take a leading position in the discussion of the membership problem this year. Since he was one of our most useful friends in the Assembly, we obviously could not press our opposition to the idea of a Committee to extremes. Mr. Stein and I discussed some possible compromise language. He suggested that the Assembly give the Secretary General authority to appoint such a Committee when he thought it appropriate, but we doubted the Secretary General would wish to be, or should be, given such discretionary authority. I suggested that alternatively, the resolution might state that such a committee should be established by the 9th General Assembly if no progress had previously been made in the solution of the membership problem by that time.
We left it that we would attempt to think of other formulae by 9:30 tomorrow morning, when the US Delegation Staff will be talking to Byrnes, and later in the day with the British.