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national straits or those that had formerly been international. A new lot of 
naval strategists wish to reopen the law of the sea again to attend to this. They 
haven’t got enough votes on their side to elect a dog-catcher, much less get such 
a measure adopted by a two-thirds majority of a new conference of plenipoten- 
tiaries on the Law of the Sea. By the time they will have found this out, in 
mid-conference, we will all be worse off than if they had not brought up the 
subject. 
3. Marginal Seas.—Another part of this sea commerce problem is the attempt 
by Russia to limit the full international character of marginal seas (31). The 
attempt is in progress with respect to the Barents Sea, the White Sea, the Baltic 
Sea, the Chuckchee Sea, the Ohkotsk Sea, the Black Sea, and presumably even- 
tually with the Yellow Sea, East China Sea, South China Sea, Red Sea, and 
Mediterranean. The Canadian desire in respect of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Hud- 
son’s Bay, and the Northwest Passages are not comforting on this aspect. The 
Indonesian and Phillipino contentions in respect of the Archipelago envelope 
theory are also still around. 
4. The Flow of Military Power.—It is nasty to talk about military power 
because, like some other necessary human activities, this is supposed to be 
treated of in private. The difficulty is that free commerce on, over, and under 
the sea has never existed in the absence of military power to enforce that freedom, 
in the same way that freedom to peacefully use the streets of cities, and the 
highways of land, has never existed for any considerable period of time in any 
particular place in the absence of police force. We all hope, and believe, that the 
millenium has come with the United Nations charter and that this is all dead 
history. There is nothing in the practice of nations, or of human being generally, 
since 1945 that gives any credence whatever to such optimism. 
Military force is national. International military force is inconsequential and 
could not fight its way out of a paper bag. There is no reason to think that sit- 
uation will improve. It has actually degraded in the past decade. Unless military 
force pledged to protect international law can flow where commerce flows, 
commerce is unlikely to flow there indefinitely. Broadening the territorial sea, 
making international straits and narrows into national straits and narrows, 
and modifying the international character of marginal seas are all measures 
directed toward limiting first the flow of military power, and only secondarily 
the flow of commerce. But the two are inseparable, and the latter cannot long 
exist without the former. 
5. Military Security.—A major selling point of the people interested in revolu- 
tionary change in the Law of the Sea has been the desire to demilitarize the 
ocean. It has yery large public appeal because everybody wishes to decrease the 
possibility of war, and the arms budget. The net effect of this gambit to date, 
however, has been only to give the Russians a small public relations ploy to make 
in the 18 Nation Disarmament Group. 
It is well known that a major factor in the present strategic balance of power 
in the world is the opacity of the ocean to most of the electro-magnetic wave 
spectrum and the short-term defense advantage this has given the United States, 
with its nuclear powered submarines equipped with ICBM missiles. It is equally 
well known that the United States has been long employed in improving its capa- 
bility to make transparent the ocean, particularly in the audible range of the 
spectrum. The first steps in this process, as is well known, has been the deploy- 
ment of listening devices broadly over the deep-seabed as well as over the con- 
tinental shelf (32). Other steps are in progress. 
It would be ridiculously foolish for the United States to terminate or lessen 
this effort to eliminate the hiding capability of weapons systems within the ocean, 
and no sensible person or nation in favor of maintaining world order is in 
favor of it. 
Aside from this opacity feature of the ocean, and some slight additional pol- 
lution risk, the use of the continental shelf and the deep seabed for the deploy- 
ment of weapons systems is no more wicked than their deployment elsewhere. 
The purpose of weapons systems, whether on the seabed, in the ocean, on the 
ocean, on land, in the atmosphere, or in space is to kill people and destroy 
property to the net advantage of the possessor of the weapons system. Where 
it is deployed is not of much consequence to the peace of the world unless 
it is in the hands of a possessor wishing to change world order by force and gives 
him sufficient advantage to lure him into the attempt. 
All of this is appropriately a part of the general disarmament problem, and 
the general world peace-keeping problem, so intimately that it cannot be dealt 
with practically and separately therefrom as an ocean problem. 
