Confronting the Aggressors
At the brink of the Cold War, Soviet delegate Andrei Vyshinsky, known for his tirades against the U.S., addressed the General Assembly meeting in Paris. Speaking directly to U.S. delegates Eleanor Roosevelt, John Foster Dulles, Warren Austin and George Marshall, Vyshinsky accused the U.S. of preparing for an atomic war against the Soviet Union because it had previously refused to adhere to a timeline of stopping plants' production of atomic material. Vyshinsky had also tussled with Britain over its occupation of Indonesia. When Edward Stettinius, the first American ambassador to the U.N., introduced a resolution in 1947 to negotiate the removal of British troops from Indonesia, Vyshinsky vetoed the resolution, calling it too weak — the first veto cast in the Security Council. Fifty more Soviet vetoes followed over the next seven years.