Primarily, this new birth of hope had resulted, as Shoghi Effendi had foreseen, from the “fiery ordeal” that had at last succeeded in “implanting that sense of responsibility” which leaders earlier in the century had sought to avoid.(89) To this new awareness had been added the effects of the fear induced by the invention and use of atomic weapons, a reaction calling to mind for Bahá’ís the Master’s prescient statements in North America that ultimately peace would come because the nations would be driven to accept it. The _Montreal Daily Star_ had quoted Him as saying: “It [peace] will be universal in the twentieth century. All nations will be forced into it.”(90) The years immediately following 1945 witnessed advances in framing a new social order that went far beyond the brightest hopes of earlier decades. Most important of all was the willingness of national governments to create a new system of international order, and to endow it with the peacekeeping authority so tragically denied to the defunct League. Meeting in San Francisco in April 1945—in the state where ‘Abdu’l-Bahá had prophetically declared, “May the first flag of international peace be upraised in this state”—delegates of fifty nations adopted the Charter of the United Nations Organization, the name proposed for it by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.(91) Ratification by the required number of member nations followed that October, and the first General Assembly of the new organization convened on 10 January 1946, in London. In October 1949, the cornerstone of the United Nations’ permanent seat was laid in New York City, hailed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá thirty-seven years earlier as the “City of the Covenant”. During His visit there He had predicted: “There is no doubt that ... the banner of international agreement will be unfurled here to spread onward and outward among all the nations of the world.”(92) Significantly, it was also on the initiative of a political leader of one of the Western hemisphere nations which had been addressed by Bahá’u’lláh, that His summons to collective security—first reflected in the nominal sanctions voted by the League of Nations against Fascist aggression in Ethiopia—was at long last given practical effect. In November 1956, Lester Bowles Pearson, then External Affairs Minister and later Prime Minister of Canada, secured the creation by the United Nations of its first international peacekeeping force, an achievement which won its author the Nobel Prize for Peace.(93) The full nature of the authority contained in such a mandate would steadily emerge as a major feature of international relations during the second half of the century. Beginning with the policing of agreements worked out between hostile states, the principle of collective action in defence of peace gradually took on the form of military interventions such as that of the Gulf War, in which compliance with Security Council resolutions was imposed by force on aggressor factions and states.