19 



A classic example of how this is working out is now available to 

 this committee if you will read what is happening in the North Sea 

 about the extraction of the gas potential there. It seems to me this 

 is the pattern of today's ai)proach. It may not be tomorrow's approach, 

 but today's approach should be to follow out how we can encour- 

 age nations to sit down, have a forum in which they can work out a 

 conference agreement, a treaty agreement in which there is an absence 

 then of violent confrontation; rather set up a forum and build on a 

 case-by-case basis some kind of principles which can then be applied 

 on a grander scale. 



Right now I just don't think we have those principles worked out, 

 and it would be a grave mistake, it seems to me, to go ahead with 

 this. Actually I am delighted to find that it is the position of the 

 United States that we do not support at this time this suggestion 

 by Malta that the sovereignty of the seabed and subsoils of the outer 

 oceans be turned over to the U.N. Rather, I think, if I understand 

 what I have been told most recently, that our position will be to 

 encourage further studies and to encourage perhaps a committee to 

 be set up to work on outer oceans as we do outer space with encourage- 

 ment for forums in which the interested nations can cooperatively 

 go into the exploitation and develop with an availability to all who 

 come the expertise to go out and participate. 



When these resources start to be realized perhaps, then we would 

 want to look out and ask how do we equitably distribute the great 

 resources of the sea. We know only of their potential at this point. 



I remember there was an old Pennsylvania Dutch recipe for wild 

 turkey which very much impressed me because at the top of the recipe 

 it says: "First get the turkey." 



It seems to me that if you are talking about stuffing it and seasoning 

 it and cooking it, when you haven't even got it you miss the very first 

 important line in the recipe — first get the turkey. I think that is my 

 concern here. 



My suggestion is that we haven't yet got the turkey. 



Mr. Fascell. Thank you very much. Congressman Hanna. 



Mr. Fraser? 



Mr. Fraser. I want to commend our colleague from California for 

 a very forthright and sensible statement. 



One of the concerns that I am sure is in the minds of some people 

 who think about these kinds of problems is that sometimes if you wait 

 a while and see what develops by way of the enlarging capacity of our 

 technology and the working out of binational and multinational 

 agreements with respect to the rights and benefits, that the situation 

 may move along to a point where it then becomes increasingly 

 difficult to move away from the preemptive national acquisitions. 



Take the problem of the moon, for example. It would have been a 

 problem had we waited until the Soviet Union and the United States 

 made claims and acquired prescriptive interests, and then the idea 

 had come up that the U.N. might enter the picture. 



I agree with your assertion that national powers such as the United 

 States and other developed nations are likely to be the source of this 

 enlarging technology and the capital required to implement it. I had 

 not supposed, however, that if some day the United Nations were to 

 acquire the title or the right to decide who can exploit this, that this 



