1971, The Seabed Treaty
Why not, I guess?
Since February 2021, I have been posting weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” all from a somewhat different angle—in You Might Want to Know on Substack. To see other entries, go to the You Might Want to Know Archive.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Thomas Gray, “Elegy in a Country Courtyard,” written between 1742 and 1751, after the death of a friend[I]t is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea - whether it is to sail or to watch it - we are going back from whence we came.
John F. Kennedy, Remarks at the Dinner for the America's Cup Crews, September 14 1962”
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
William James
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that had been formulated by the UN’s Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee was opened for signature on July 1, 1968. It was signed that year by the US, UK, and USSR, who were the “depository states.” In treaties, all “depository states” have to sign and ratify the treaty for it to “enter into force.” Forty other countries would also have to sign and ratify this one.
That would happen quickly, it turned out, by March 5, 1970.
The NPT was a very big deal, I thought, even though in other ways it wasn’t. The major problem, I thought, was that if the treaty allowed the states that now had nuclear weapons—the US, the UK, the Soviet Union, France and China—to keep them. The argument was that the weapons that the weapons were necessary for their “security.”
I couldn’t see how any other country that felt it needed to have nuclear weapons for its security could be argued out of developing them if it wanted to, except by force. Which is of course not an “argument.” And doesn’t always work either, in spite of what those who are inclined to use force may think.
Right now, in 1968, our war in Vietnam was showing that.
The issue wasn’t just whether a nation had nuclear weapons, then. The issue before that was whether a nation felt “secure.”
Being, and feeling “secure,” is a slipperier matter than we may think at first, isn’t it. Moves we may think make us more secure—like having a gun in the house, or invading another country—can in the end do the opposite, can’t they? Though we are unlikely to be able to change minds in advance about this, it seems. Sometimes, it’s live and learn. If you live. And learn.
Fewer countries having nuclear weapons did seem like a good idea to me though. Even countries that didn’t have nuclear weapons seemed to agree. More and more countries were signing the NPT treaty.
I think everyone, almost, approved of the commitment that Article VI of the NPT made that the nuclear armed states would engage in “negotiations in good faith” about completely disarming themselves.
Except how in heaven’s name were you going to make negotiations like that happen if the good faith wasn’t there already ?
Still, when you make a commitment without having actually made the commitment yet, you can, sometimes, grow into it, can’t you. Wasn’t something like that happening in our country when it came to what our Declaration of Independence had said about all of us being created equal? In 1776, we definitely weren’t all equal yet in this country. Even George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had “owned” slaves.
In 1968, I was about to turn 28 not be subject any longer, as I understood it, to being drafted to fight in the war in Vietnam that I had such deep doubts about. That was a relief. Whatever I chose to do now, I wouldn’t have to choose to do it in order not to do something else. I could choose it because it made sense to me and I wanted to do it.
In 1968, the year the NPT was signed, I graduated from the NYU School of Law and headed to San Francisco to take a job I’d gotten as a law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. I wasn’t really committed to becoming a lawyer but I was looking forward to the job, and to being in the city of San Francisco.
We’d see what developed.
After I got settled in the Van Ness Motor Hotel on Van Ness Avenue, I bought a motorcycle. Not a big one. But not a small one either. A Honda 350, a model that tried to combine being a street bike with being a dirt bike. I’d be using it as a street bike, on the hilly streets of San Francisco and the Bay Area. Maybe also in Big Sur.
Might even take it across the Golden Gate Bridge some day to San Quentin where some of the people whose petitions I’d be reading were imprisoned.
Some of whom had been imprisoned for how they had protested the war in Vietnam.
After the NPT was signed in 1968, the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee in the United Nations expanded its membership. Sure. Why not? The ENDC would add Argentina, Morocco, Japan, Hungary, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia to the group. Three of those countries were being governed by communists. The rest weren’t. They might be in the control of dictators or military governments, but they weren’t in the control of communists.
One of them, Yugoslavia, was under the control of a communist dictator, Marshal Tito, but Tito had managed not to become part of the Soviet Union. That was unusual.
The group would now be called the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament.
The United Nations would still, then, have a committee dedicated to working on disarmament, as it had from its beginning in 1946. Would the expanded Committee on Disarmament be able to get something going that would meet the requirement in Article 6 of the NPT for negotiations in good faith by the nuclear weapon states on “general and complete” disarmament?
There was no sign of that yet but the NPT had been in effect for only a year. The Soviet Union had signed and ratified it, and so had Yugoslavia, by 1970.
My judge’s name was Judge Chambers. It really was. He was the Chief Judge. From the beginning, I liked him. Quirky and smart. He was well known for writing opinions that were much shorter than the norm. Especially than those written by the U. S. Supreme Court.
I very much enjoyed my year as a law clerk in the Ninth Circuit.
At the end of that year, we got the job done. On July 20, 1969, as I was wrapping up my year as a law clerk, we beat the Soviets to getting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely to earth. At about the same time, I turned down a job offer from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. William Rehnquist was the new Assistant Attorney General our newly elected President Nixon had put in charge of the OLC. I had flown back to Washington D.C. and had an interview with him that helped me decide. Something didn’t feel right. He asked me if I thought I could “play with the team.” Is that what you are supposed to do, first of all, in the Department of Justice?
At the end of the summer, I took the train from Oakland to Laramie, Wyoming to live with someone I’d met in Oxford.
In Spring 1970, I took a job in the Department of English at the University of Wyoming as a part-time instructor teaching first-year writing and the Introduction to Literature. I think I might have found the challenges of teaching those two courses more interesting than some of my colleagues in the English Department did.
It looked like I wasn’t going to be a lawyer.
President Nixon, who’d been elected in 1969, the year we put a man on the moon and I decided not to take the job in the Office of Legal Council, was going to be an active president, it quickly became clear. His predecessor Lyndon Johnson had also been an active president but with a focus on domestic policy, like on civil rights and fighting poverty. On achieving “The Great Society,” was the expression he used. Nixon would have more of a focus on foreign policy. Not just on the Vietnam War, which was going as badly as ever, but on nuclear weapons. President Nixon had chosen as his Secretary of State a man named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was taken to be an expert in that area. He’d written a book. Not for us so much. For other experts.
The last treaty dealing with nuclear weapons developed by the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee of the United Nations was called the Seabed Arms Control Treaty. Negotiations for it had started in the United Nations in 1969, the year after the NPT was signed, with a Soviet proposal for the complete “demilitarization” of the ocean floor.
Not many of us knew that the ocean floor had been “militarized,” I suspect.
The United States had declined to go along with the Soviet proposal because it was, we said, unverifiable. Also, since the early 1950’s, we’d been installing all over on the ocean floor a Sound Surveillance System to detect Soviet submarines. By now, SOSUS was quite extensive. We sure didn’t want to give that up.
The Seabed Treaty that we finally agreed to with the Soviet Union prohibited locating weapons of mass destruction more than twelve nautical miles from our coasts. Which I wouldn’t have said was verifiable either, but whatever.
The treaty also prohibited us both from interfering with anybody else’s surveillance system.
Our Ballistic Missile Submarines, and theirs, would be allowed beyond the twelve-mile area because they weren’t sitting on the seabed. They were suspended in the water column.
The Seabed Treaty was opened for signature in Washington, D.C., London, and Moscow on February 11, 1971. The United States Senate ratified it on May 18, 1972. Twenty-two other countries had also ratified by then. China hadn’t but in 1991, it would accede to the treaty. France was holding out, and still is.
The Seabed Treaty wasn’t a huge deal. But it was something. It was another agreement. An agreement is something. Just because the parties have agreed to something.
So now we nuclear powers had agreed not to place our nuclear weapons
in Antarctica (in 1959, as I was graduating from high school),
in outer space or on “celestial bodies” (in 1967, while I was in the Department of Justice tracking riots in American cities), and
on the seabed more than twelve miles—twelve nautical miles, which is a little more than twelve miles—from our coasts.
As the Seabed Treaty was being negotiated, President Nixon had said the treaty would be a good idea because, “like the Antarctic and Outer Space treaties, it would ‘prevent an arms race before it has a chance to start.’"
Good point.
Might we have made a treaty that prevented the nuclear arms race itself before it had a chance to start? Niels Bohr, Franklin Roosevelt, and J. Robert Oppenheimer had thought so.
They’d been overruled. No such agreement had been tried for.
Next: 1972, The Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty