Oil and the Future

Abstract

"Tell me," said Secretary Harold L. Ickes, the Petroleum Administrator for War, early in 1944, "the sort of agreement that the United Nations will reach with respect to the world's petroleum resources when the war is over, and I will undertake to analyze the durability of the peace that is to come." Ickes has now gone, but no such agreement has been reached. Proposals for a UN Oil Authority have been made since 1947, always to be stifled by the threat of veto of the oil powers. The United States and Britain have often found themselves in conflict in the grab for the rich deposits of the Middle East, but they stand together in keeping everyone else out.

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