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The Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENDC) devoted its major efforts from the endof July 1965 until April 1968 to negotiating the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, spending little time on other arms control measures in the sessions throughout this period. In May 1968 the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics jointly presented the draft treaty to the First (Political and Security) Committee of the United Nations General Assembly. After lengthy debate and acceptance of several amendments to meet the wishes of nonnuclear states the Treaty reached its final form on May 21, 1968, and was "commended" in General Assembly Resolution 2373 (XXII) of June 12, 1968.

Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons is one facet of the problem of preventing nuclear war, a problem which has engaged the statesmen of the world ever since the dust of the Nagasaki explosion settled. In the Truman-Attlee-King declaration of November 15, 1945, the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and the Prime Minister of Canada proposed that the United Nations set up a commission to study how atomic energy could be controlled so as to limit its use to peaceful purposes, how atomic weapons could be eliminated from national armaments, and how safeguards could be set up so as to ensure that all nations would comply widi the obligations which they undertook to these ends. Thus fell to the United Nations one of the most intractable problems of international organization, a problem which might be looked on as the creation of a new sphere of international law.