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Canada’s Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, was aboard the Queen Mary in the Atlantic on this date in 1945. He was heading to London for talks with Prime Minister Clement Attlee and other members of the British government.
“I am more and more of the opinion that the proposed UN organization will be worse than nothing unless Russia can be brought to the point where she will agree to allow the Security Council to investigate conditions in Russia which may occasion suspicion and also agree to do away with veto by one of the Great Five on action proposed by the Security Council,” King wrote. “If that is not done, Russia will be able to prepare for war and bring on war herself without warning to others.
Prime Minister King had very good reason to be both skeptical and fearful of Soviet Russian at this point. It had been, after all, less than a month since Igor Gouzenko had defected from the USSR’s Ottawa embassy with news that his former government operated a large spy ring in Canada with the goal of stealing as much information as possible about the West’s nuclear program.Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon.
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