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conceive of an undersea installation being put offshore and used as 

 a weapon against another country. Wouldn't it be possible to consider, 

 at this time, neutralizing those areas ? I assume the continental shelves 

 already can be used both for defense or quite possibly for offensive 

 purposes and that there are no rules of the road to prevent such a 

 development. 



Might it not be declared that the deep seabeds are off limits for such 

 purposes ? 



Admiral Hearn, You certainly could say it, yes, sir, but I don't 

 laiow whether it would be in the best interest of our national security 

 to go so far as to commit ourselves to that proposition well in advance 

 of the development of the technical knowledge which will indicate 

 what is in the best interest of our national security. 



Mr. Frelinghuysen. Let's get back to the question of developing 

 knowledge. Could we not, on some kind of international basis, develop 

 more knowledge of what is under the sea ? 



Mr. Secretary, this can be directed to you. 



Mr. Frosch. I think we are discussing three different things which 

 are intimately associated with each other. One is the question of 

 rules of the road. This deals specifically with how moving ships, 

 whether submerged or not, deal with each other and with fixed ob- 

 stacles in close proximity. They are essentially traffic rules designed 

 to alleviate dangerous situations and avoid collisions and damage. 

 There is some study going on now as to how the rules of the road 

 which were principally established for surface traffic may be extended 

 to situations that may be somewhat more complicated underseas. 



I think that in the long run we will have to codify some legal 

 practice. To date there have been so few actual situations that most 

 of the studies are conducted through experiments in which people 

 postulate various situations and try to work out what might happen. 

 There has been some discussion of this problem in the Coast Guard 

 and some discussion internationally in an organization called the Inter- 

 governmental Marine Consultative organization which is the group 

 that has undertaken most of the rules-of-the-road type of codification. 

 I think over the next few years there will be more consideration of 

 these, essentially, traffic and safety problems. 



The second problem is the problem of knowledge which I referred 

 to, and that has principally to do with the nature and properties of 

 the seabed both as a place in which things can be built and as a place 

 in which there are natural resources and objects which might be 

 worth retrieving or exploiting. To proceed to construct legal regimes 

 without having more knowledge of the situations to which the legal 

 regimes would apply would be a fairly dangerous thing to do. 



Mr. Frelinghuysen. That was not what I was asking. I was saying, 

 apart from whether or not we should establish a legal regime or an 

 internationally controlled area, isn't it a reasonable proposition to 

 establish general principles of international cooperation and actual 

 practice ? As I understand it you have already been participating in 

 such operations. 



Mr. Frosch. I was going on to say that one of the major series of 

 discussions that we had at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic 

 Commission during the past 2 weeks had to do with the question of 



