1185 
machinery they have proposed, if put in train, would use up more money than it 
would take in and this would be subtracted from the financial support of the 
good works now done by the United Nations and its family of specialized 
agencies. 
They have held forth promises of peace and good will that would result from 
making militarily neutral the seabed while well knowing that in the arsenals 
of the world are weapons of several types stored in sufficient volume to wipe out 
the human race several times over, with delivery systems in the hands of more 
than one nation, and that sweeping the seabed clean would contribute inconse- 
quentially to the balance of power, or the peace, of the world. 
They have attempted by clumsy subterfuge, and quickly detected indirection, 
to substitute international government for international cooperation by sSov- 
ereign national governments, and by so doing have set rich against poor, strong 
against weak, and developing against industrialized to the end that progress in 
achieving international cooperation among governments and peoples has been 
slowed down. 
They have stated a lack of a regime for the deep-seabed when one fully suit- 
able to present needs is available, and they have demanded an urgent definition 
for the outer boundary of the continental shelf more precise than the vague one 
deliberately adopted by the comity of nations in 1958, on the basis of rapidly 
deepening technological needs that do not exist. 
With their alarums and excursions they have excited even more vividly the 
normal greed of the ignorant, and with their pseudo-science and existentialist 
economics have confused the national legislatures who provide the funds for 
international assistance and cooperation as to the difference between mutual as- 
sistance through international channels and international government, with the 
result that sources of funds for the former, always ‘hard to get, are becoming 
even more difficult to extract from national budgets. 
By their actions they have set back the International Decade of Ocean Ex- 
ploration and the Long Range Expanded Program of Ocean Research by some 
years at best, and with it damaged seriously the possibility of actually making 
the ocean more useful to man until the confusion they have introduced about 
the ocean and its affairs can be washed away by the rising tide of desire by all 
to know and use the ocean more wisely. 
If the amateurs, dilettantes and reformers who have fastened upon the ocean 
as a vehicle to make humans less human, and more saintly, could be caused to 
switch their attention from the ocean to the moon, or Mars, or Venus, or nearby 
space, the cost of the space program to both Russia and the United States would 
have been money well spent. ; 
CONCLUSIONS 
By way of conclusion I make the following recommendations for action by the 
United States Government : 
1. Hold fast to the contention that the breadth of the territorial sea is three 
miles.—There is no better protection for small nations than freedom for their 
commerce to use the sea with the minimum possible interference from coastal or 
other nations, and this rule will prevail as they experience that truth (35). It 
was ‘true when Thomas Jefferson, as the Secretary of State of a very weak and 
new nation, set it down in 1794. It was true when Elizabeth I, as the sovereign 
of a very Small nation, which turned out not to be so weak, set it down nearly 
200 years before that. (36). It will be even more true for small and weak nations 
a hundred years from now. 
2. Keep open international straits and marginal seas to the flow of peaceful 
commerce and the mitilary force required to keep the flow free from unreasonable 
impedance.—Tests of strength will be necessary from time to time to accomplish 
this as it was near Matsu Island, in the Gulf of Tonkin, and during the Cuban 
missile crisis. From time to time forebearance for a period of time may be the 
better part of valor, as in the attempted passage of U.S. Coast Guard vessels 
north of Russia, overflights past Ecuador and Peru, and the use of the Red Sea. 
But over the long run ocean trade routes must be Kept open to preserve the peace, 
even if it takes war to do it, as it has in the past. 
3. Cease agitating for a precise definition to the outer boundary of the conti- 
nental shelf.—Agitation for a revision of the Convention on the Continental Shelf 
will, if successful, lead inevitably to another general Conference of Plenipo- 
tentiaries on the Law of the Sea. In the present unstable political situation of 
the world it is unlikely that decisions would be reached in this field as satisfac- 
