NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM LEGISLATION 391 



Toward the end of the war the Department of State undertook inquiries 

 tiniong the prinicyal maritime nations aimed at finding out whether or not 

 there would be agreement to changing international law so that the resources 

 of the subsoil of the Continental Shelf would appertain to the adjacent coastal 

 country so long as the character of the superjacent water as high seas was not 

 not altered. It discovered that there was almost uniform agreement among these 

 •nations to such a change. 



It is important to note, in reading what follows, that neither then nor since 

 has there been any substantial disagreement amongst nations respecting this 

 change in international law. 



Accordingly President Truman, in September 1945, issvied a proclamation 

 declaring the subsoil of the Continental Shelf and its resources adjacent to the 

 United States as appertaining to the United States, and specifically stating that 

 this claim did not purport to change the character of the superjacent water 

 as high seas. All of this was agreeable among the nations and led in the direc- 

 tion of settling the internal squabble amongst the States and Federal Govern- 

 ment in the United States as to which owned and would govern, and colleet 

 taxes from, the harvesting of these resources. 



Also President Truman's proclamation opened a Pandora's box of claims by 

 other sovereign nations seeking to alter other aspects of the law of the sea 

 in manners critically disadvantageous to U.S. desire and interest. It took 

 15 years of very serious diplomatic activity by the United States and its 

 ■allies to bring these other claims under control, and all of them have not yet been 

 extinguished. 



The reasons for this included : 



(1) Informal diplomatic notes are not binding in general in international 

 law. There requires to be a treaty which is signed and ratified by each 

 sovereign to which it applies. ^ 



(2) If the matter is of general interest, as is a change in the law of the 

 sea, a conference of plenipotentiaries is required to which all nations 

 affected may come. Decisions of substance at such conferences require a 

 two-thirds majority vote. 



(3) Other sovereigns, while agreeable to the change the United States 

 had in mind, had other changes in the law of the sea which they wanted 

 made. Several of these would have been severely damaging to U.S. interest 

 if adopted. These other sovereigns did not wish to vote for the ideas of the 

 United States in the ensuing conferences held on this subject if the United 

 States would not vote for their ideas. 



To start this action off, Mexico in October 1945 indicated its intention of claim- 

 ing as its sovereign territory the sea. as well as the Continental Shelf, adja- 

 cent to its coast to such a distance as it felt from time to time to be appropriate. 

 Argentina in October 1946 claimed as its sovereign territory both the Con- 

 tinental Shelf off its coast (several hundred miles wide in some places) and 

 the sea above it. Chile in June 1947, having a very narrow Continental Shelf 

 but not wishing to be left out, claimed sovereignty to the sea and the land under 

 it to a minimum distance of 200 miles offshore. Peru in August 1947 followefl 

 with a similar claim. Other claims of varying nature by other sovereign na- 

 tions followed. 



In Latin America these claims became politically active in the Organization 

 of American States and its specialized organs. By 1954 there was a general 

 sentiment in Latin America that the proper breadth of the territorial sea for 

 Latin America was a minimum distance of 200 miles. Those nations sought to 

 adopt that policy as international law for the Latin American region. This 

 was impossible to do under international law because — 



(1) twenty-one nations in one region of the international commons can- 

 not legislate away the rights of the other 94 nations in that region by their 

 own unilateral action, and 



(2) it is impractical to legislate for one sector of the high seas without 

 legislating at the same time for the rest of it. 



These conflicting and extravagant claims in Latin America could not be lived 

 with by the United States as a principle maritime power. Mercantile and mili- 

 tary policy, quite aside from resource harvesting policy, absolutely forbid be- 

 coming subject to such claims. The same was true of other maritime nations. 



Accordingly the United States stimulated the United Nations and its special- 

 ized agencies to become active in this subject, as a means of getting this by 

 now flaming controversy into an arena where it could be brought under control. 



