UN General Assembly
1961

76. This session of the General Assembly convenes at a time of more than usual tenseness. Many of us may feel that the world today is subjected to strains and pressures and risks, even of war, that are greater than at any time since the Organization came into existence. Many of us are perhaps conscious of certain parallels with the nineteen-thirties, when mankind felt itself rather impotently edging towards a catastrophe. And we all know that today the results of a catastrophe, the results of a world war, would be so much more terrible than they were in the late nineteen-thirties. It is a crisis that centres particularly over Berlin and, to some extent, over Germany as a whole. The outstanding thing about this crisis is that It Is largely a manufactured crisis. The problems of Berlin and of Germany are fundamental problems, they are persisting problems, and they are not problems that are going to be solved overnight.