The Deep-Sea Bed

A nation with a chance to expand its borders double- or triple-fold would normally be considered quite fortunate. The United States is faced with such a prospect but finds it less a fortuitous circumstance than a very deceptive dilemma.

The real estate involved is the seabed of the deep ocean. The opportunity for the United States lies in muscular marine technology and permissive international law. The emergence of marine mineral extraction, particularly oil, makes the seabed a target for exploitation and vulnerable to claims of sovereignty. In 1945, the United States extended its sovereignty to include the seabed of the adjacent continental shelf (which goes out to a depth of 200 meters) and invited other nations to do likewise. In 1958, the international Law of the Sea Conference exceeded this invitation by adopting a Convention on the Continental Shelf. The convention declares that a nation’s shelf can extend “to a depth of 200 metres or, beyond that limit, to where the depth of the superjacent waters admits of the exploitation of the natural resources.” Dr. Wilbert Chapman, a former State Department official in marine matters, observes, “A fishing vessel may not wreck on such a defined continental shelf, but a Ship of State could.”

This generous extension—or loophole, as many critics claim— could provide a means for the United States, with its broad ocean frontage and its marine technology, to claim eventually much of the seabed of the North Atlantic and the North and Central Pacific. At the same time, the obvious international implications of such claims provide a rationale for some sort of international control over the deep-sea bed.

Undersea power

In a speech in 1967 advocating international control over the seabed, Malta’s delegate to the UN, Dr. Arvid Pardo, put forth four general reasons for such a move. First, international control could prevent a “land grab” conducive to tense diplomatic confrontations. (“We would see a scramble for land like the one in Africa and Asia in the last century.”) Second, international control could prevent an arms race from engulfing the seabed. Third, international control could regulate marine pollution that might affect seabed resources such as sea disposal of radioactive wastes. Fourth, international control could ensure that the financial gains from seabed exploitation “be used primarily to promote the development of poor countries.”

This proposal was submitted to the UN as a suggestion, not a resolution. In response, the UN Assembly voted (93 to zero) to form an Ad Hoc Committee to Study the Peaceful Uses of the Seabed and Ocean Floor Beyond the Limits of Jurisdiction. Better known as the Ad Hoc Committee of 35—based on the number of member nations— this committee submitted its report last fall to the UN Assembly. Despite the shortage of time and the wide range of nations represented—from landlocked Austria to sea-girt Ceylon to Russia and the United States—the report announced a “measure of agreement” on the need for an international regime on seabed exploitation, and on restriction to peaceful purposes.

Now the UN has unanimously agreed to establish a Permanent Committee on Peaceful Uses of the Seabed to see if agreement could be reached on deep-sea bed boundaries, and an international authority to manage it. The UN also by unanimous vote approved a U.S.-originated proposal for an international decade of ocean exploration.

Race to grab

Such international involvement in the destiny of the deep-sea bed at first appeared to fit in with U.S. policy. As the outgrowth of a U.S. proposal in 1966, the SecretaryGeneral of the UN is supposed to recommend ways to expand international cooperation in marine exploration. In fact, one U.S. official appeared to have contributed to the reasoning—if not some of the wording—used by Dr. Pardo. “Under no circumstances, we believe, must we ever allow the prospects of rich harvest and mineral wealth to create a new form of colonial competition among the maritime nations. We must be careful to avoid a race to grab and to hold the lands under the high seas. We must ensure that the deep seas and the ocean bottoms are, and remain, the legacy of all human beings,” President Johnson remarked in commissioning an oceanographic vessel some time ago. The President even invoked the sentiment of an American poet. “ ‘The sea,’ in the words of Longfellow, ‘divides and yet unites mankind.’ ”

But in giving such abstract pronouncements a more specific flavor, the Maltese proposal aroused some very vocal opposition, particularly in the House Subcommittee on Oceanography. While most liberal in the funding of U.S. marine programs, many committee members are quite conservative about matters of international relations, and about the UN in particular. “I think any alternative would be preferable to giving the bottom of the sea to the United Nations,” observed former Congressman Ed Reinecke of California. Congressman Thomas Pelly of Washington preferred to give the UN something else. “I think you might rather turn over the resources of the moon to them than the resources of the sea.”

Stalking-horse

Tipped off beforehand of the Maltese proposal, these congressmen raised sinister questions whether Malta was a stalking-horse for the British. Pardo had to preface his UN speech by saying, “I can categorically state that we are not a sounding board for any state and that nobody ‘put the Maltese government up to it.’ ” Governor Ronald Reagan even felt compelled to send a telegram to Congress, citing his opposition to “UN jurisdiction” and stating that California is developing “ocean resources with our national posture having the highest national priority.”

Whose interest?

Interestingly enough, neither the Maltese proposal nor the UN resolution creating the Ad Hoc Committee singles out the UN as the vehicle of international control. The congressmen were using the Maltese proposal to strike back at what they feel might be special interests and pleadings behind the concept of international control. Previously, the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, research affiliate of the United Nations Association of the United States of America, proposed that the UN control the resources of both the deep-sea bed and the seas above. Furthermore, revenues would be used to finance more than just nations. “One of the most challenging reasons for United Nations control and administration of the sea is to provide the UN with an independent income,” argues Commission Chairman Clark Eichelberger. Senator Frank Church of Idaho, a longtime supporter of the UN, has introduced legislation along these lines.

That such a role might help remedy two of the UN’s most debilitating weaknesses—its shaky financial base and its inability to forestall potential international conflicts—did not impress members of the subcommittee as being in the general, rather than special, interest. However, if these congressmen proved that special interests may be behind international control, they also proved that special interests may be behind opposition. Our offshore oil industry today possesses the potential to drill beyond the geological continental shelf. The Navy is already installing navigation and communication aids for submarines on the seabed. The Navy’s Deep Ocean Program, according to the Naval Research Review, portends the ability “to design and emplace or construct a variety of facilities beneath the sea, such as fuel caches, supply depots, refueling stations, submarine repair facilities, nuclear weapon shelters, utility systems and power generators.” Business Week warned in a subheadline, “Big U.S. government and industry investment in underwater research is threatened by Maltese proposal that UN be given control of ocean floor.”

Our own technological advances have prompted Congressman Paul Rogers of Florida, a senior subcommittee member, to declare, “I feel that the Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf clearly states that the continental shelf is a national limit only if a nation can exploit no further. We shall be able to exploit further and no giveaway should stand in our way.”

National lake

But in his zeal to give industrial and military interests free rein, Congressman Rogers tends to confirm the concern over a possible “land grab” raised by Dr. Pardo and President Johnson. The congressman proposed to the Marine Technology Society that “our national goal in oceanography should be to occupy, with the capacity to defend, out to the mid-Atlantic range. Our goal should not fall one inch short of the mid-Atlantic range.” It should be noted that the midAtlantic range is not the Atlantic’s true middle. It lies decidedly to the east; in fact, it encompasses a possession of Portugal, the Azores. The irritating existence of islands upsets the supposition that a “national lake” approach to the seabed necessarily favors the United States. Francis Christy, Jr., of Resources for the Future, supports international control and argues,

According to the continental shelf convention, islands have the same rights as mainlands, and indeed, it is difficult to see how they could be excluded. Thus, the French and the British would be among the chief beneficiaries of the national lake approach. The French would receive a vast area of the Indian Ocean because of Kerguelen, Crozet, and other islands. And they also would get a large area of the eastern tropical Pacific, in part because of Clipperton Island, a desolate rock lying about 500 miles southwest of Mexico. To the British would go more than half of the South Atlantic Ocean because of Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha and South Georgia. A large share of the North Atlantic including part of the Blake Terrace would fall to the British because of Bermuda and the Bahamas. The trust territories of the South Pacific would be virtually impossible to divide.

France and Canada already dispute seabed ownership of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.

Robert Krueger of the American

Bar Association Committee on Marine Resources suggests another self-defeating aspect to flaunting one’s seabed technology: “If one country’s technology is sufficient to permit it to exploit offshore areas to a depth of 10,000 feet and thus permit it to claim the same as continental shelf, every country’s continental shelf is so extended.”

Boomerang

Because of the boomerang potential inherent in a national lake approach, many Navy officials and oil spokesmen favor a less ambitious approach. The “flag-nation” approach would give a nation jurisdiction over its nationals in the uses of the seabed without conferring sovereignty. While appropriate to the mobile nature of high-seas fishing and navigation, this approach isn’t really in harmony with the static nature of the seabed. What happens when nationals from two different countries converge upon the mineral deposits of one seamount in the Central Pacific? Nations, unlike football teams, are reluctant to accept ties. The ocean’s sheer size is no guarantee against such collisions. Scientists with Scripps Institution of Oceanography have located Pacific seamounts carpeted with surface mineral deposits that may easily become of economic importance in the future. Indeed, such continuing scientific revelations eliminate one standard means of adjudication, rights of discovery.

Downshift

The contradictions inherent in the national-lake and flag-nation approaches lead some opponents of international control to adopt a very restrained attitude. The National Oceanography Association, an industrial-academic group, says, “We believe very strongly that it would be premature to confer title to the ocean’s resources upon the UN or any other international group.” In this light, the seabed lease policy of the Department of the Interior becomes a paragon of appropriate caution. “You may want to know whether the Department has decided on a line beyond which it will not lease, or has decided to lease as far out as anyone might suggest. The answer on both counts is no,” former Interior official Frank Berry told the American Bar Association’s National Institute on Marine Resources. (At present, the line goes out as far as 300 miles and embraces points as deep as 6800 feet.) At the same time, a famous papal decision has been offered as an example of premature haste. “There was a papal bull that divided the whole New World even before people had a good map of it,” Congressman Richard Hanna of California points out. “I don’t know that the UN would be in any better position than the Pope was at the time.”

Ironically enough, these calls for caution run side by side with proud assertions of the coming feasibility of recovering manganese deposits from the Blake Terrace, a portion of the seabed that, as Christy points out, both the United States and the United Kingdom may be claiming. After noting that “the Navy is moving at flank speed to discover and harness the mysteries of the deep,” Rear Admiral Wilfred Hearn abruptly downshifts to urge, “We should not be too hasty in formulating new finite legal concepts. . . . Should the tailor cut the cloth before he measures the man?”

Better business

It would indeed be ironic if the deep-sea bed, with all its potential wealth, were not to contribute to the general security and welfare of the human condition. Dr. Pardo warns that “the consequences of not creating a vehicle for international control will be very grave: at the very least a dramatic escalation of the arms race and sharply increasing world tension, caused also by the intolerable injustice that would reserve the . . . resources [of the seabed] for the exclusive benefit of less than a handful of nations.” Thus, when based on broader considerations of U.S. policy, forms of international control become more appealing. Even Chairman Alton Lennon of the House Subcommittee on Oceanography concedes that such an approach has appeal in conservative circles: “I know in discussing it individually with some members of the Presidential Commission [on Marine Resources] who are business people [that] they like the Pardo resolution. I think big business perhaps can do better business with one central organization for exploitation of minerals and oils particularly.” (A San Francisco mining firm has recently requested a lease from the UN to investigate Red Sea mineral deposits.)

Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, author of national sea grant legislation, has introduced an “ocean space treaty” resolution that would seek international agreement on a standard continental shelf boundary. Under the Pell Resolution, the UN would license and fix fees on exploitation of the deep-sea bed, “with due regard given to the encouragement of the development of the technologically developing states.” Emplacement of nuclear weapons on the seabed would be prohibited, but instruments to identify and track submarines would be permitted. A UN “Sea Guard" would enforce the Ocean Space Treaty. Several liberal senators support the Pell Resolution; the Defense Department quickly demurred.

Amidst this welter of sharpening opinions on what to do about the seabed, the State Department maintains flexible neutrality, but there has been increasing tolerance shown to the efforts of the Ad Hoc Committee.

Other nations are going through a similar process. A group of seven Scandinavian and developing nations are already urging a moratorium on exploitation of the deepsea bed to expedite international control. But there are those who lean toward a far more conservative policy. Russia, which reluctantly supported formation of the Ad Hoc Committee, warned the UN General Assembly of the “inadmissability of any undue haste.”

In Russia, the ocean’s destiny inspires a familiar diversity of opinion. Soviet Deputy Premier Mikhail Yefremov asserts, “The ocean can he conquered only by the joint efforts of all countries.”G. V. Petrovich prefers to update a muchrepeated sentiment by Sir Walter Raleigh: “The nation that first learns to live under the seas will control the world.”However, Soviet spokesmen would undoubtedly unite in opposition to one seabed approach. “The national-lakes approach would provide virtually no gains to the Soviet Union, other than a small slice of the Northwest Pacific and the Barents Sea and Arctic Ocean,”notes Christy.

Congressmen like Pelly and Lennon have cited the Russian attitude as a model one to State Department officials. Undersea Technology, a trade magazine, even speculates on a possible Russo-U.S. alliance to forestall any UN action on the seabed. “As in the past, arm-twisting behind the scenes will spell the difference. Both countries have considerable largesse to dispense and the threat of withholding aid can change minds,”the magazine comments. Ironically, during the UN Ad Hoc Committee sessions, both Russia and the United States agreed on one form of international involvement in the seabed. Both countries submitted resolutions urging that the Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament consider the question of seabed arms control.

While the effects of international “arm-twisting” are often overestimated, the United States, with its ocean frontage and its technical prowess, will undoubtedly possess considerable leverage, with or without Russia. The question that remains is to what end this leverage will be used. The answer will in large part determine whether Longfellow’s sentiment that “the sea divides and yet unites mankind” is a contradiction or a strong possibility.

—Wesley Marx