SOME THOUGHTS ON RAPE

...The atrophy of the common heritage has had a curious but little noticed effect on the Conference...

...companies to mine the deep seabed and give them financial guarantees in the bargain...

...They too lack vision—rand boldness...

...delegation, Ambassador Elliot Richardson, has voiced his feeling that Congress will not and should not approve the ICNT unless the articles on the Authority are drastically changed...

...In the late forties and early fifties Spaak, Monnet, Schuman and dozens of others saw that the best way to build peace in Europe was to build Europe...

...Former enemies became good friends...

...Lack of vision has been a major fault of the Conference...

...It is as if the greater its power the more valuable it will be as a symbol of the radical, "new international economic order" which certain Third World countries are championing...

...To change the Law of the Sea Conference's direction, to make it "come about," will be a very difficult task...

...And meaningful SALT agreements would be much easier to achieve if the nations of the world were already working together to save the seas and to use the wealth of the seabeds to promote peace and justice...

...Meanwhile in Washington, Congress is giving very serious consideration to deep seabed mining legislation which would torpedo the Conference...

...Thus, what the SALT talks need most is not, as some appear to believe, an omniscient computer which links missile inventories, throwweights, ranges, relative accuracies and a thousand other variables in one magic formula...

...Meanwhile the head of the U.S...

...It is a major reason for the pessimism which envelops it as it limps toward a seventh session to be held in Geneva from late March to early May...

...For a bold and imaginative treaty will permit practical compromises on problems, such as the Seabed Authority, which are almost insoluble when they are approached, as they are now, in a doctrinaire spirit...

...In 1976, speaking of an earlier but essentially similar treaty draft, he said, "It will enormously increase inequality between states and consequently world tensions and conflicts...

...But it had a profound—and profoundly constructive—effect on the European scene...

...If they thought about that arms control potential, the law of the sea delegates would adopt a very different approach to their work...

...It is making the Third World countries take a much more ideological approach to the nature and powers of the proposed Authority...

...JOHN j. logue is Director of the World Order Research Institute of Villanova University and editor of the recent book, The Fate of the Oceans...

...They, and their counterparts in every country, should begin to ask how the SALT and salt water talks can help each other...

...The chances are that it will end with no treaty or with a "giveaway treaty" that awards most of the immense wealth of the oceans to a very few nations...

...The same spirit of accommodation will permit compromises on problems of arms control and disarmament which now appear to be insoluble...

...A law of the sea treaty which mandates—and funds—an effective antipollution strategy, a law of the sea treaty which mandates—and funds—a multi-billion dollar economic development program—such a treaty could excite the interest and imagination of men and women everywhere...

...Could ordinary men and women—here and abroad— be excited by the prospect of a bold and generous law of the sea treaty...

...The delegates know that twenty billion dollars a year could do a great deal to promote peace and justice...

...A bold and generous treaty, a real common heritage treaty, will be easier to complete and to sell than the giveaway treaty now before the Conference...

...Without such a linkage, the SALT talks will fail sooner or later...

...To understand what has happened to the common heritage, one has to understand that if Pardo's 1967 plan had been adopted it would now be producing at least twenty billion dollars a year in common heritage revenues...

...It is the central part of an "Appeal" to the Conference adopted by law of the sea diplomats and others during a sixty-mile sail from United Nations Headquarters out into the Atlantic Ocean...

...The salt water talks could play a major role in devising a community-building strategy...

...Law of the sea negotiators would not be so vulnerable to special interest groups if they could persuade the general public that the law of the sea treaty they are championing would be a major step toward peace, justice and economic and political stability...

...I believe they could...

...Such a treaty could help set the stage for a meaningful arms limitation treaty...

...One interesting sharing proposal is the so-called "Barba Negra Formula...

...The Fund would get three billion dollars a year now and considerably more in the years to come...

...As law of the sea diplomats work to give away the common property of mankind, arms negotiators are having one more try at restraining the mad race for nuclear armaments, delivery systems, laser beams, neutron bombs and the like...

...Where are the Jean Monnets and George Marshalls of the oceans...

...and Soviet Union appear to ijeiieve that arms control is a technical problem, a problem for the experts...

...They know that three hundred million dollars a year can do next to nothing to solve the problems of a world of six billion people...

...Unfortunately, the U.S...

...He has lectured on the law of the sea in fifteen countries and attended each session of the Law of the Sea Conference...

...But a workable strategy for building world peace will be essentially similar to the strategy that worked so well in Europe...

...There is broad agreement that the Conference is in deep trouble...

...SALT/SALT WATER TALKS JOHN J. LOGUE Lack of vision has been a major fault The "salt water talks" which have been going on for the last four years could do far more to limit strategic arms than the much publicized SALT talks...

...It is now ten years since the day, November 1, 1967, when Ambassador Arvid Pardo of Malta made his famous speech, a four-hour one, urging the UN General Assembly to embrace that concept...

...It is admittedly very late to talk of a major change of course in the Law of the Sea Conference...

...With it they can, and it is to be hoped, will succeed...

...Unfortunately, the "arms control potential" of the giant United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea has not been on the minds of the several thousand delegates who have participated in the Conference's six working sessions, most recently in last year's May-July session in New York City...

...The sail on the square-rigger Barba Negra took place on August 22, 1976...

...We need them badly...

...Yet such a change is essential if the Conference is to write a worthwhile treaty and a treaty that will last...

...In July of 1976 almost all of us were moved by the visit of the tall ships to New York City...

...Pardo, universally acclaimed as the father of the Law of the Sea Conference, has given his answer to those questions...

...The Barba Negra formula provides for graduated sharing of mineral revenues within the zone...

...The moral is clear...

...Such a treaty would require a major change in the direction of the giant Conference...

...If legislation of this sort becomes law it may well sink the Conference...

...In this view, the Authority's value does not come from what it produces...

...So did the disarmament negotiators of the 1920s and 1930s...

...The conventional explanation for that trouble centers on the bitter struggle over the nature and powers of the proposed International Seabed Authority...

...What they built was far from perfect...

...But nothing could be farther from the truth...

...It is time for Cyrus Vance and Elliot Richardson to sit down together...

...In particular, it would require a conscious decision that the common heritage will include a substantial portion of the revenues from offshore oil and gas...

...They seem to be saying that if the common heritage won't bring meaningful revenues for 3 February 1978: 74 the Third World, as everyone assumed it would, then at least the Third World must get an ideological dividend from the Conference...

...Indeed, some nations want it to produce very little...

...But that struggle is a symptom, not a cause...

...The world is a very different place from Western Europe...

...If you want workable arms control and disarmament you must build community and the institutions of community...

...Its value is rather in how much power it has...

...A strong ocean authority with substantial funding could do for the world what the Coal and Steel Community and the Economic Community have done for Western Europe, i.e., build trust, community, prosperity and, most importantly, peace...

...They would do their best to build strong ocean institutions and provide substantial funding for them, especially from the thirty trillion dollars worth of oil and gas to be found in the continental margins of the world...

...The Europeans learned this lesson at great cost...

...It took the horrors of World War II to teach it to them...

...Will a giveaway treaty help the struggle for a new and more just international economic order...

...By substantial funding I mean at least five to ten billion dollars a year...

...But when, less than a month later, the giant Law of the Sea Conference came into the city almost no one knew it was there...

...The draft treaty now before the Conference, the Informal Composite Negotiating Text (ICNT), is just such a treaty...

...If the Conference would raise its sights and its sails I believe that a new wind would fill its sails, the wind of an informed and enthusiastic public opinion...

...It is the betrayal of the common heritage by the leading nations in the Conference and not least by the United States which, in August of 1976, proposed a very generous sharing plan, a plan which it quickly abandoned...

...Speaking at Villanova University at a special colloquium in his honor Pardo said that the resource zone in the treaty is "a monumental grab for riches, unprecedented in world history...

...Unfortunately, the fouryear-old Conference is moving in the opposite direction...

...It would require the poorest coastal states to contribute only one percent of their economic zone mineral revenues to a World Common Heritage Fund and the richest to contribute as much as twenty percent...

...What they need most is another kind of linkage: a linkage of an arms control strategy with an imaginative strategy for building world community...

...That kind of money could do a great deal to assist Third World development, to fund the urgent fight against ocean pollution and to assist the work of the United Nations...

...It is scandalous but hardly surprising that the preamble to the present treaty omits the word "justice" and does not even mention "the common heritage of mankind...

...The first step will be to persuade the delegates to cut through the fog of ideology, legalese and bloc politics and ask themselves two key questions: Is a giveaway treaty a good way to build peace...

...The French and Germans, who had fought three savage wars in seventy years, began to work in close and constructive cooperation...

...Recently Professor Pardo—he is now on the political science faculty at the University of Southern California—fired a broadside at the ICNT...

...They know that twenty billion a year is more than sixty times the tiny amount—three hundred million dollars a year—which the Seabed Authority is expected to produce in 1987, i.e., ten years from now, if the present text is adopted...

...This will be accomplished if they get a strong Authority with powers not only to fix prices and to limit production, but also to ride roughshod on any private or state corporations which want to exploit the nodules in the deep ocean...

...While one wishes them well, one cannot be optimistic as to the long-term results of Commonweal: 73 their negotiations...

...The present text awards all that wealth, the cream of the common heritage, to the coastal states and most of it to a handful of nations, most of them developed nations...

...Arms control and disarmament are basically political problems—not technical problems...

...The riches in question were, under traditional international law, res communis, i.e., common property...

...The result of it will be, he said, "the rich get richer, the poor remain poor and the landlocked countries which, with few exceptions, are the poorest of the poor, become poorer...

...They were brilliantly successful in doing so...

...they would begin to ask, "How well can we build...

...It makes a mockery of the concept which inspired the Conference, the concept of ocean resources as "the common heritage of mankind...

...The real cause of the trouble is much deeper...

...If they are not, it is quite likely that Congress will defy the Conference and "go unilateral," i.e., it will authorize U.S...

...Instead of asking, "How much can we grab...

...In a word, there must be sharing of the immense mineral wealth of the 200-mile economic zone, and not just the much less important wealth of the deep ocean...