658 



The question becomes that of whether we can foresee and take effective 

 action concerning these problems before they become insoluble or whether law 

 must always lag behind life. It took the Titanic disaster to produce the Safety 

 of Life at Sea Convention. It has taken the Torrey Canyon disaster to prompt 

 vigorous action conc-erning the oil-pollution risk from giant tankers. Must the 

 progress of the law to cope with the new problems arising from the progress of 

 science and technology always wait upon disaster? There are clearly fields, 

 notable among them that of nuclear energy, in which the consequences of 

 disaster may be so far-reaching that the failure of the law to keep in step with 

 life may involve not merely frustration, hardship and injustice, but the collapse 

 of the whole legal order. 



He noted that there were prototypes such as the U.N. Conventions on 

 the Law of the Sea, the Antarctic Treaty, the Moscow Nuclear Test 

 Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Liability Conventions, and the Space Treaty. 

 Others were needed, such as an Open Depths Treaty, an Arctic Treaty, 

 a Radioactive Pollution Treaty, and a World Weather Treaty. In- 

 deed — "We may . . . within the next few years need a Sonic Boom 

 Treaty, a Center of the Earth Treaty, a Cybernetics Treaty and a 

 Molecular Biological Treaty.'' However, he questioned whether it 

 would be adequate to deal separately with each of these problems. 

 They were all "aspects of the broader problem of the role of law, 

 internationally as well as nationally, in the social control of the new 

 relationship between man and his environment created by contempo- 

 rary scientific and teclmological progress." Accordingly — 



The social control of science and technology takes its place with the renuncia- 

 tion of force as an instrument of national policy, the promotion of economic 

 stability and growth, the protection of civil liberties and the progress of social 

 justice among the major objectives of policy which are giving altogether new 

 dimensions to international law in our time and gradually but relentlessly trans- 

 forming it from a law between States only and exclusively into the common law 

 of mankind.^'* 



The need for a general strengthening of institutions for interna- 

 tional assessment and control of technology was seen by Allan Mc- 

 Knight, formerly Inspector-General of the International Atomic 

 Energy Agency : 



If the scale of international regulation of science and technology increases 

 (and this writer believes that it must), then the content of the business of 

 our Institutions mu.st change. These consequential changes will include : 



(a) much closer links between foreign ministries and the scientific 

 coonmunity, 



( & ) much greater concern within scientific communities with r^ula- 

 tion of activities rather than positive conduct of activities, 



(c) a larger component of scientific skills and knowledge within 

 foreign ministries, 



(d) a deeper concern with regulation within the governing bodies and 

 secretariats of international organizations, 



(e) closer links all over between scientists, technologists, politicians, 

 and lawyers, 



(/) above all, a logical process for achieving Lnternational regu- 

 lation.'*" 



The Internationalization of Military Technology 



Of the three options that Rostow sees as open to a technologically 

 advanced nation ^"^ the first seems to have been largely blunted by 

 technology itself. In the face of a nuclear weapons capability, mili- 

 tary conquest in the future dare not be too ambitious ; war must be 



^"^ C. Wilfred Jenks. "The New Science and tlie Law of Nations." International and 

 Comparative Law Quarterly. (April 1968, Volume 17), pages 328-332. 



10^ McKnight. "International Regulation of Science and Technology," op. cit., pages 

 752-3. 



108 These were : military expansionism, achievement of a high-consumption economy, and 

 development of the welfare state ; see page 14. 



