Hammer and sickle
The hammer and sickle is a symbol of proletarian solidarity, first adopted – as Russian: серп и мо́лот, translit. Serp i mólot: "hammer" -- during the Russian Revolution. At the time of its creation, the hammer stood for the proletariat and the sickle for the peasantry—combined they stood for the worker-peasant alliance for socialism; the sickle symbol resembles a sickle used to harvest grain crops and the hammer is one that would be used to make a razor sharp edge on a sickle or scythe. After World War I and the Russian Civil War, the hammer and sickle became more used as a symbol for peaceful labor within the Soviet Union and for international proletarian unity, it was taken up by many communist movements around some with local variations. Today after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle remains commonplace in Russia and other former union republics, but its display is prohibited in some other former communist countries as well as in countries where communism is banned by law.
Farm and worker instruments and tools have long been used as symbols for proletarian struggle. The combination of hammer and sickle symbolised the combination of farmers and construction workers. One example of use prior to its political instrumentalisation by the Soviet Union is found in Chilean currency circulating since 1895. An alternative example is the combination of a plough, with the same meaning. In Ireland, the symbol of the plough remains in use; the Starry Plough banner was used by the Irish Citizen Army, a socialist republican workers' militia. James Connolly, co-founder of the Irish Citizen Army with Jack White, said the significance of the banner was that a free Ireland would control its own destiny from the plough to the stars. A sword is forged into the plough to symbolise the end of war with the establishment of a Socialist International; this was flown by the Irish Citizen Army during the 1916 Easter Rising. In 1917, Vladimir Lenin and Anatoly Lunacharsky held a competition to create a Soviet emblem.
The winning design was a hammer and sickle on top of a globe in rays of the sun, surrounded by a wreath of grain and under a five-pointed star, with the inscription "proletariats of the world, unite!" in six languages. It featured a sword, but Lenin objected, disliking the violent connotations; the winning designer was Yevgeny Ivanovich Kamzolkin. On 6 July 1923, the 2nd session of the Central Executive Committee adopted this emblem; the Coat of Arms of the Soviet Union and the Coats of Arms of the Soviet Republics showed the hammer and sickle, which appeared on the red star badge on the uniform cap of the Red Army uniform and in many other places. Serp i Molot is the name of the Moscow Metallurgical Plant. Serp i Molot is the name of a stop on the electric railway line from Kurski railway station in Moscow to Gorky, featured in Venedikt Yerofeyev's novel, Moscow-Petushki. At the time of creation, the hammer and sickle stood for worker-peasant alliance, with the hammer a traditional symbol of the industrial proletariat and the sickle a traditional symbol for the peasantry, but the meaning has since broadened to a globally recognizable symbol for Marxism, Marxist parties, or socialist states.
In the Soviet Union, the hammer and sickle came to take on a gendered meaning, with the sickle coming to be associated with women and the hammer men. Two federal subjects of the post-Soviet Russian Federation use the hammer and sickle in their symbols: the Vladimir Oblast has them on its flag and the Bryansk Oblast has them on its flag and coat of arms, the central element of its flag. In addition, the Russian city of Oryol uses the hammer and sickle on its flag; the former Soviet national airline, continues to use the hammer and sickle in its symbol. The hammer and sickle can be found as a logo on most ushanka hats the Soviet-styled ones The de facto government of Transnistria uses the flag and the emblem of the former Moldavian SSR, which includes the hammer and sickle; the flag can appear without the hammer and sickle in some circumstances, for example on Transnistrian-issued license plates. Three out of the five ruling Communist parties use a hammer and sickle as the party symbol: the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of Vietnam and the Lao People's Revolutionary Party.
All of these use the yellow-on-red colour scheme. In Laos and Vietnam, the hammer and sickle party flags can be seen flying side-by-side with their respective national flags. Many communist parties around the world use it, including the Communist Party of Greece Communist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of Brazil, the Egyptian Communist Party, the Communist Party of Pakistan, the Communist Party of Spain, the Communist Party of Denmark, the Communist Party of Norway, the Romanian Communist Party, the Lebanese Communist Party, the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Shining Path; the Communist Party of Sweden, the Portuguese Communist Party and the Mexican Communist Party use the hammer and sickle imposed on the red star. The hammer and sickle accompanied by the yellow star is used by the Communist Refoundation Party, the main communist party in Italy. Many symbols having similar structures and messages to the original have been designed. For example, the Angolan flag shows a segment of a cog, crossed by a machete and crowned with a socialist star while the flag of Mozambique features an AK-47 crossed
The Mythical Man-Month
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"; this idea is known as Brooks' law, is presented along with the second-system effect and advocacy of prototyping. Brooks' observations are based on his experiences at IBM while managing the development of OS/360, he had added more programmers to a project falling behind schedule, a decision that he would conclude had, counter-intuitively, delayed the project further. He made the mistake of asserting that one project—involved in writing an ALGOL compiler—would require six months, regardless of the number of workers involved; the tendency for managers to repeat such errors in project development led Brooks to quip that his book is called "The Bible of Software Engineering", because "everybody quotes it, some people read it, a few people go by it".
The book is regarded as a classic on the human elements of software engineering. The work was first published in 1975, reprinted with corrections in 1982, republished in an anniversary edition with four extra chapters in 1995, including a reprint of the essay "No Silver Bullet" with commentary by the author. Brooks discusses several causes of scheduling failures; the most enduring is his discussion of Brooks's law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. Man-month is a hypothetical unit of work representing the work done by one person in one month. Complex programming projects cannot be partitioned into discrete tasks that can be worked on without communication between the workers and without establishing a set of complex interrelationships between tasks and the workers performing them. Therefore, assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule will make it later; this is because the time required for the new programmers to learn about the project and the increased communication overhead will consume an increasing quantity of the calendar time available.
When n people have to communicate among themselves, as n increases, their output decreases and when it becomes negative the project is delayed further with every person added. Group intercommunication formula: n / 2 Example: 50 developers give 50 · / 2 = 1225 channels of communication. Brooks added "No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering"—and further reflections on it, "'No Silver Bullet' Refired"—to the anniversary edition of The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks insists that there is no one silver bullet -- "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises one order of magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." The argument relies on the distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity, similar to the way Amdahl's law relies on the distinction between "strictly serial" and "parallelizable". The second-system effect proposes that, when an architect designs a second system, it is the most dangerous system they will design, because they will tend to incorporate all of the additions they did not add to the first system due to inherent time constraints.
Thus, when embarking on a second system, an engineer should be mindful that they are susceptible to over-engineering it. The author makes the observation that in a suitably complex system there is a certain irreducible number of errors. Any attempt to fix observed. Brooks wrote "Question: How does a large software project get to be one year late? Answer: One day at a time!" Incremental slippages on many fronts accumulate to produce a large overall delay. Continued attention to meeting small individual milestones is required at each level of management. To make a user-friendly system, the system must have conceptual integrity, which can only be achieved by separating architecture from implementation. A single chief architect, acting on the user's behalf, decides what goes in the system and what stays out; the architect or team of architects should develop an idea of what the system should do and make sure that this vision is understood by the rest of the team. A novel idea by someone may not be included if it does not fit seamlessly with the overall system design.
In fact, to ensure a user-friendly system, a system may deliberately provide fewer features than it is capable of. The point being, if a system is too complicated to use, many features will go unused because no one has time to learn them; the chief architect produces a manual of system specifications. It should describe the external specifications of the system in detail, i.e. everything that the user sees. The manual should be altered as feedback comes in from the users; when designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system. This system acts as a "pilot plan" that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system; this second, smarter system should be the one delivered to the customer, since delivery of the pilot system would cause nothing but agony to the customer, ruin the system's reputation and maybe the company. Every project manager should create a small core set of formal documents defining the project objectives, how they are to be achieved, going to achieve them, when they are going to be achieved, how much
Robber baron (industrialist)
"Robber baron" is a derogatory metaphor of social criticism applied to certain late 19th-century American businessmen who were accused of using unscrupulous methods to get rich, or expand their wealth, for example Cornelius Vanderbilt taking money from government-subsidized shippers, in order to not compete on their routes. The term was based on an analogy to the German robber barons, local feudal lords or bandits in Germany who waylaid travellers through their ostensible territory, claiming some tax or fine was owed; the term robber baron derives from the Raubritter, the medieval German lords who charged nominally illegal tolls on the primitive roads crossing their lands or larger tolls along the Rhine river—all without adding anything of value, but instead lining their pockets at the cost of the common good. The metaphor appeared as early as February 9, 1859, when The New York Times used it to characterize the business practices of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Historian T. J. Stiles says the metaphor "conjures up visions of titanic monopolists who crushed competitors, rigged markets, corrupted government.
In their greed and power, legend has it, they held sway over a helpless democracy."The first such usage was against Vanderbilt, for taking money from high-priced, government-subsidized shippers, in order to not compete on their routes. Political cronies had been granted special shipping routes by the state, but told legislators their costs were so high that they needed to charge high prices and still receive extra money from the taxpayers as funding. Vanderbilt's private shipping company began running the same routes, charging a fraction of the price, making a large profit without taxpayer subsidy; the state-funded shippers began paying Vanderbilt money to not ship on their route. A critic of this tactic drew a political comic depicting Vanderbilt as a feudal robber baron extracting a toll. Charles R. Geisst says, "in a Darwinist age, Vanderbilt developed a reputation as a plunderer who took no prisoners." Hal Bridges said that the term represented the idea that "business leaders in the United States from about 1865 to 1900 were, on the whole, a set of avaricious rascals who habitually cheated and robbed investors and consumers, corrupted government, fought ruthlessly among themselves, in general carried on predatory activities comparable to those of the robber barons of medieval Europe."The term combines the pejorative senses of criminal and aristocrat.
Hostile cartoonists might dress the offenders in royal garb to underscore the offense against democracy. Historian Richard White argues that the builders of the transcontinental railroads have attracted a great deal of attention but the interpretations are contradictory: at first hostile and very favorable. At first, White says, they were depicted as: Robber Barons, standing for a Gilded Age of corruption and rampant individualism, their corporations were the Octopus. In the twentieth century and the twenty-first they became entrepreneurs, necessary business revolutionaries, ruthlessly changing existing practices and demonstrating the protean nature of American capitalism, their new corporations transmuted and became manifestations of the "Visible Hand," a managerial rationality that eliminated waste, increased productivity, brought bourgeois values to replace those of financial buccaneers. Historian John Tipple has examined the writings of the 50 most influential analysts who used the robber baron model in the 1865–1914 period.
He argues:The originators of the Robber Baron concept were not the injured, the poor, the faddists, the jealous, or a dispossessed elite, but rather a frustrated group of observers led at last by protracted years of harsh depression to believe that the American dream of abundant prosperity for all was a hopeless myth.... Thus the creation of the Robber Baron stereotype seems to have been the product of an impulsive popular attempt to explain the shift in the structure of American society in terms of the obvious. Rather than make the effort to understand the intricate processes of change, most critics appeared to slip into the easy vulgarizations of the "devil-view" of history which ingenuously assumes that all human misfortunes can be traced to the machinations of an located set of villains—in this case, the big businessmen of America; this assumption was implicit in all of the criticism of the period. American historian Matthew Josephson further popularized the term during the Great Depression in a 1934 book.
Josephson alleged that, like the German princes, American big businessmen amassed huge fortunes immorally and unjustly. The theme was popular during the 1930s amid public scorn for big business. Historian Steve Fraser says the mood was hostile toward big business:Biographies of Mellon and Rockefeller were laced with moral censure, warning that "tories of industry" were a threat to democracy and that parasitism, aristocratic pretension and tyranny have always trailed in the wake of concentrated wealth, whether accumulated dynastically or more impersonally by the faceless corporation; this scholarship, the cultural persuasion of which it was an expression, drew on a rooted sensibility–partly religious egalitarian and democratic–that stretched back to William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Jackson and Tom Paine. However a counterattack by academic historians began. Business historian Allan Nevins challenged this view of American big businessmen by advocating the "Industrial Statesman" thesis. Nevins, in his John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, took on Josephson
Promised Land
The Promised Land is the land which, according to the Tanakh, was promised and subsequently given by God to Abraham and his descendants, in modern contexts an image and idea related both to the restored Homeland for the Jewish people and to salvation and liberation is more understood. The promise was first made to Abraham confirmed to his son Isaac, to Isaac's son Jacob, Abraham's grandson; the Promised Land was described in terms of the territory from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates river. A smaller area of former Canaanite land and land east of the Jordan River was conquered and occupied by their descendants, the Israelites, after Moses led the Exodus out of Egypt, this occupation was interpreted as God's fulfilment of the promise. Moses anticipated that God might subsequently give the Israelites land reflecting the boundaries of God's original promise, if they were obedient to the covenant; the concept of the Promised Land is the central tenet of Zionism, whose discourse suggests that modern Jews descend from the Israelites and Maccabees through whom they inherit the right to re-establish their "national homeland".
Palestinians claim partial descent from the Israelites and Maccabees, as well as all the other peoples who have lived in the region. The imagery of the "Promised Land" was invoked in African-American spirituals as heaven or paradise and as an escape from slavery, which can only be reached by death; the imagery and term have been used in popular culture, sermons and in speeches, such as the "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech by Martin Luther King Jr.: "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord." The promise, the basis of the term is contained in several verses of Genesis in the Torah. In Genesis 12:1 it is said: The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you."and in Genesis 12:7: The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring I will give this land."Commentators have noted several problems with this promise and related ones: It is to Abram's descendants that the land will be given, not to Abram directly nor there and then.
However, in Genesis 15:7 it is said: He said to him, "I am the LORD, who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it." However, how this verse relates to the promises is a matter of controversy. There is nothing in the promise to indicate God intended it be applied to Abraham’s physical descendants unconditionally exhaustively or in perpetuity. Jewish commentators drawing on Rashi's comments to the first verse in the Bible, assert that no human collective has any a priori claim to any piece of land on the planet, that only God decides which group inhabits which land in any point in time; this interpretation has no contradictions since the idea that the Jewish people have a claim to ownership rights on the physical land is based on the idea of God deciding to give the land to the Jewish people and commanding them to occupy it as referred to in Biblical texts mentioned. In Genesis 15:18-21 the boundary of the Promised Land is clarified in terms of the territory of various ancient peoples, as follows: On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates - the land of the Kenites, Kadmonites, Perizzites, Amorites, Canaanites and Jebusites."The verse is said to describe what are known as "borders of the Land".
In Jewish tradition, these borders define the maximum extent of the land promised to the descendants of Abraham through his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. The promise was confirmed to Jacob at Genesis 28:13, though the borders are still vague and is in terms of "the land on which you are lying". Other geographical borders are given in Exodus 23:31 which describes borders as marked by the Red Sea, the "Sea of the Philistines" i.e. the Mediterranean, the "River,". The promise is fulfilled at the end of the Exodus from Egypt. Deuteronomy 1:8 says: See, I have given you this land. Go in and take possession of the land that the LORD swore he would give to your fathers—to Abraham and Jacob—and to their descendants after them, it took a long time. The furthest extent of the Land of Israel was achieved during the time of the united Kingdom of Israel under David; the actual land controlled by the Israelites has fluctuated over time, at times the land has been under the control of various empires. However, under Jewish tradition when it is not in Jewish occupation, the land has not lost its status as the Promised Land.
Traditional Jewish interpretation, that of most Christian commentators, define Abraham's descendants as Abraham's seed only through his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob, to the exclusion of Ishmael and Esau. This may however reflect an eisegesis or reconstruction of primary verses based on the late
Multistage rocket
A multistage rocket, or step rocket, is a launch vehicle that uses two or more rocket stages, each of which contains its own engines and propellant. A tandem or serial stage is mounted on top of another stage; the result is two or more rockets stacked on top of or attached next to each other. Two-stage rockets are quite common, but rockets with as many as five separate stages have been launched. By jettisoning stages when they run out of propellant, the mass of the remaining rocket is decreased; each successive stage can be optimized for its specific operating conditions, such as decreased atmospheric pressure at higher altitudes. This staging allows the thrust of the remaining stages to more accelerate the rocket to its final speed and height. In serial or tandem staging schemes, the first stage is at the bottom and is the largest, the second stage and subsequent upper stages are above it decreasing in size. In parallel staging schemes solid or liquid rocket boosters are used to assist with launch.
These are sometimes referred to as "stage 0". In the typical case, the first-stage and booster engines fire to propel the entire rocket upwards; when the boosters run out of fuel, they fall away. The first stage burns to completion and falls off; this leaves a smaller rocket, with the second stage on the bottom, which fires. Known in rocketry circles as staging, this process is repeated until the desired final velocity is achieved. In some cases with serial staging, the upper stage ignites before the separation—the interstage ring is designed with this in mind, the thrust is used to help positively separate the two vehicles. A multistage rocket is required to reach orbital speed. Single-stage-to-orbit designs have not yet been demonstrated; the reason multi-stage rockets are required is the limitation the laws of physics place on the maximum velocity achievable by a rocket of given fueled-to-dry mass ratio. This relation is given by the classical rocket equation: Δ v = v e ln where: Δ v is delta-v of the vehicle.
The delta v required to reach low Earth orbit requires a wet to dry mass ratio larger than can realistically be achieved in a single rocket stage. The multistage rocket overcomes this limit by splitting the delta-v into fractions; as each lower stage drops off and the succeeding stage fires, the rest of the rocket is still traveling near the burnout speed. Each lower stage's dry mass includes the propellant in the upper stages, each succeeding upper stage has reduced its dry mass by discarding the useless dry mass of the spent lower stages. A further advantage is that each stage can use a different type of rocket engine, each tuned for its particular operating conditions, thus the lower-stage engines are designed for use at atmospheric pressure, while the upper stages can use engines suited to near vacuum conditions. Lower stages tend to require more structure than upper as they need to bear their own weight plus that of the stages above them. Optimizing the structure of each stage decreases the weight of the total vehicle and provides further advantage.
The advantage of staging comes at the cost of the lower stages lifting engines which are not yet being used, as well as making the entire rocket more complex and harder to build than a single stage. In addition, each staging event is a possible point of launch failure, due to separation failure, ignition failure, or stage collision; the savings are so great that every rocket used to deliver a payload into orbit has had staging of some sort. One of the most common measures of rocket efficiency is its specific impulse, defined as the thrust per flow rate of propellant consumption: I s p = T d m d t g 0 When rearranging the equation such that thrust is calculated as a result of the other factors, we have: T = I s p g 0 d m d t These equations show that a higher specific impulse means a more efficient rocket engine, capable of burning for longer periods of time. In terms of staging, the initial rocket stages have a lower specific impulse rating, trading efficiency for superior thrust in order to push the rocket into higher altitudes.
Stages of the rocket have a higher specific impulse rating because the vehicle is further outside the atmosphere and the exh
Soviet crewed lunar programs
The Soviet crewed lunar programs were a series of programmes pursued by the Soviet Union to land a man on the Moon, in competition with the United States Apollo program to achieve the same goal set publicly by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961; the Soviet government publicly denied participating in such a competition, but secretly pursued two programs in the 1960s: crewed lunar flyby missions using Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft launched with the Proton-K rocket, a crewed lunar landing using Soyuz 7K-LOK and LK Lander spacecraft launched with the N1 rocket. Following the dual American successes of the first crewed lunar orbit on December 24–25, 1968 and the first Moon landing on July 20, 1969, a series of catastrophic N1 failures, both Soviet programs were brought to an end; the Proton-based Zond program was canceled in 1970, the N1 / L3 program was de facto terminated in 1974 and canceled in 1976. Details of both Soviet programs were kept secret until 1990 when the government allowed them to be published under the policy of glasnost.
As early as 1961, the Soviet leadership had made public pronouncements about landing a man on the Moon and establishing a lunar base. Sergei Korolev, the senior Soviet rocket engineer, was more interested in launching a heavy orbital station and in crewed flights to Mars and Venus. With this in mind, Korolev began the development of the super-heavy N-1 rocket with a 75-ton payload. In its preliminary Moon plans, Korolev's design bureau promoted the Soyuz A-B-C circumlunar complex concept under which a two-crew spacecraft would rendezvous with other components in Earth orbit to assemble a lunar flyby excursion vehicle; the components would be delivered by the proven middle-sized R-7 rocket. While developing the N1, beginning in 1963, Korolev began to plan a Moon landing mission using two launches and docking. Korolev managed to increase the payload of the N1 to 92-93 tons, providing enough power to accomplish the mission with a single launch. Another main space design bureau headed by Vladimir Chelomei proposed a competing cislunar orbiting mission using a heavy UR-500K rocket and a two-crew LK-1 spacecraft.
Chelomei proposed a Moon landing program with a super-heavy UR-700 rocket and an LK-700 spacecraft. The Soviet government issued a response to the American Apollo challenge after three years. According to the first government decree about the Soviet crewed Moon programs, adopted in August 1964, Chelomei was instructed to develop a Moon flyby program with a projected first flight by the end of 1966, Korolev was instructed to develop the Moon landing program with a first flight by the end of 1967. Following the change from Nikita Khrushchev to Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, the Soviet government in September 1965 assigned the flyby program to Korolev, who redesigned the cislunar mission to use his own Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft and Chelomei's Proton rocket. Korolev organized full scale development of both programs, but died after surgery in January 1966. According to a government decree of February 1967, the first crewed flyby was scheduled for mid-1967, the first crewed landing for the end of 1968. Launched by a 3-staged Proton rocket, the L1 was a spacecraft from the Soyuz family and consisted of two or three modified modules of the main craft Soyuz 7K-OK with a total weight of 5.5 tons.
The Apollo orbital spacecraft for the lunar flyby had two modules but was five times heavier, carried a crew of three and entered lunar orbit, whereas the L1 performed a flight around the Moon and came back on a return trajectory. Planned for 8 December 1968 for priority over the US, a first crewed mission of the L1 was canceled due to the insufficient readiness of the capsule and rocket. After Apollo 8 won the first phase of the Moon Race at the end of 1968, the Soviet leadership lost political interest in the L1 program. A few reserve units of L1 made unpiloted flights; the crewed landing plan adopted a similar method to the single launch and lunar orbit rendezvous of the Apollo project. For mission safety, weeks before the crewed mission, an LK-R uncrewed L3 complex and two Lunokhod automated rovers would be sent to the Moon, to work as radio beacons for crewed LK, with the LK-R used as a reserve escape craft; the Lunokhods were equipped with manual controls for the cosmonauts, both for transfer to LK-R in necessity and for regular research.
The N1 rocket would carry the L3 Moon expedition complex, with two spacecraft and two boosters. A variant of the Soyuz craft, the "Lunniy Orbitalny Korabl" command module, would carry two men, with three modules like the regular Soyuz 7K-OK, but was heavier by a few tons; the 7K-OK was half the mass of the three-crew Apollo orbital command ship. The "Lunniy Korabl" accommodated only one cosmonaut, so in the Soviet plan, only one cosmonaut would land on the Moon; the mass of the LK was 40% of the mass of the Apollo lunar lander. The L3 complex to be placed in LEO by the N1 was 93 tons; the mass of the LOK and LK was 40% of the Apollo complex, but was equivalent to the L3 complex without Block G. The booster for the LEO toward the Moon for the Apollo vehicle was provided by the last stage of the Saturn V, while for the Block D, LOK and LK, this was to be provided by Block G of the same L3
United Nations
The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization, tasked to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international co-operation and be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. The headquarters of the UN is in Manhattan, New York City, is subject to extraterritoriality. Further main offices are situated in Geneva, Nairobi and The Hague; the organization is financed by voluntary contributions from its member states. Its objectives include maintaining international peace and security, protecting human rights, delivering humanitarian aid, promoting sustainable development and upholding international law; the UN is the largest, most familiar, most internationally represented and most powerful intergovernmental organization in the world. In 24 October 1945, at the end of World War II, the organization was established with the aim of preventing future wars. At its founding, the UN had 51 member states; the UN is the successor of the ineffective League of Nations.
On 25 April 1945, 50 governments met in San Francisco for a conference and started drafting the UN Charter, adopted on 25 June 1945 in the San Francisco Opera House, signed on 26 June 1945 in the Herbst Theatre auditorium in the Veterans War Memorial Building. This charter took effect on 24 October 1945; the UN's mission to preserve world peace was complicated in its early decades during the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union and their respective allies. Its missions have consisted of unarmed military observers and armed troops with monitoring and confidence-building roles; the organization's membership grew following widespread decolonization which started in the 1960s. Since 80 former colonies had gained independence, including 11 trust territories, which were monitored by the Trusteeship Council. By the 1970s its budget for economic and social development programmes far outstripped its spending on peacekeeping. After the end of the Cold War, the UN shifted and expanded its field operations, undertaking a wide variety of complex tasks.
The UN has six principal organs: the General Assembly. The UN System agencies include the World Bank Group, the World Health Organization, the World Food Programme, UNESCO, UNICEF; the UN's most prominent officer is the Secretary-General, an office held by Portuguese politician and diplomat António Guterres since 1 January 2017. Non-governmental organizations may be granted consultative status with ECOSOC and other agencies to participate in the UN's work; the organization, its officers and its agencies have won many Nobel Peace Prizes. Other evaluations of the UN's effectiveness have been mixed; some commentators believe the organization to be an important force for peace and human development, while others have called the organization ineffective, biased, or corrupt. In the century prior to the UN's creation, several international treaty organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross was formed to ensure protection and assistance for victims of armed conflict and strife.
In 1914, a political assassination in Sarajevo set off a chain of events that led to the outbreak of World War I. As more and more young men were sent down into the trenches, influential voices in the United States and Britain began calling for the establishment of a permanent international body to maintain peace in the postwar world. President Woodrow Wilson became a vocal advocate of this concept, in 1918 he included a sketch of the international body in his 14-point proposal to end the war. In November 1918, the Central Powers agreed to an armistice to halt the killing in World War I. Two months the Allies met with Germany and Austria-Hungary at Versailles to hammer out formal peace terms. President Wilson wanted peace, but the United Kingdom and France disagreed, forcing harsh war reparations on their former enemies; the League of Nations was approved, in the summer of 1919 Wilson presented the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations to the US Senate for ratification.
On January 10, 1920, the League of Nations formally comes into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations, ratified by 42 nations in 1919, takes effect. However, at some point the League became ineffective when it failed to act against the Japanese invasion of Manchuria as in February 1933, 40 nations voted for Japan to withdraw from Manchuria but Japan voted against it and walked out of the League instead of withdrawing from Manchuria, it failed against the Second Italo-Ethiopian War despite trying to talk to Benito Mussolini as he used the time to send an army to Africa, so the League had a plan for Mussolini to just take a part of Ethiopia, but he ignored the League and invaded Ethiopia, the League tried putting sanctions on Italy, but Italy had conquered Ethiopia and the League had failed. After Italy conquered Ethiopia and other nations left the league, but all of them realised that they began to re-arm as fast as possible. During 1938, Britain and France tried negotiating directly with Hitler but this failed in 1939 when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.
When war broke out in 1939, the League closed down and its headquarters in Geneva remained empty throughout the war. The earliest concrete plan for a new world organization began under the aegis of the U. S. State Department in 1939; the text of the "Declaration by United Nations" was drafted at the White House on December 29, 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Roosevelt aide Harry Hopkins
