UN General Assembly
1970

8. But unfortunately, every coin has two faces. After a difficult birth following the Second World War, the United Nations, which is twenty-five years old, is still very much marked by the personality of its main authors. We remember the many compromises which were adopted at Yalta in February 1945 relating to the greatPower veto in the Security Council. It is probably understandable that after the war the idea should have been born that the main responsibility for the installation and protection of a new political world order should be vested in the victorious great Powers and that they should have taken this opportunity of taking the best seats in this temple that they were building. And it is thus that the Security Council, in which the Charter vests primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace, became an arena where they become aware of their tremendous power, when the veto imposed by one of them renders the Council impotent.