Torpedo for the Seabed Treaty

By refusing to sign, the U.S. may imperil its oceanic rights

It has long been an open secret in Washington that Ronald Reagan was decidedly unhappy with the Law of the Sea Treaty, a kind of constitution for the world's waters, sponsored by the U.N. Though former Ambassador Elliot Richardson, then Jimmy Carter's chief negotiator for the pact, endorsed a draft in 1980, the Reagan Administration announced early the next year that it wanted to take a closer look. This April, while 130 nations okayed a new draft, the U.S. was one of only four nations (the others: Turkey, Venezuela and Israel) to vote against it. In his final rejection of the treaty, President Reagan announced last week that the U.S. would neither sign, nor adhere to, the pact.

The complex treaty negotiations, which began in 1974, involved diplomats from 154 countries. The document covers issues ranging from the definition of an island to pollution safeguards. It guarantees freedom of passage on the high seas and sets a twelve-mile territorial limit and 200-mile "economic," or fishing, zone for coastal nations. The pact also spells out strict rules for seabed mining and establishes an International Seabed Authority to govern the harvesting of ocean minerals. That organization would set up its own mining enterprises, retaining mine sites equal in size or value to every site awarded to private companies; those firms would be required to sell their technology to the global authority under certain circumstances and to abide by production ceilings.

Reagan ticked off five reasons for rejecting the treaty, most of them involving the mining provisions. As the President saw it, the agreement gave too much control of private companies to the Seabed Authority, a potentially burdensome new international bureaucracy over which the U.S. would have little influence. He opposed the production controls, the mandatory sale of technology, and private firms' having to compete with an enterprise controlled by the treaty's signers. Reagan was displeased by a proviso that some of the U.N. enterprises' profits, intended for distribution to the Third World, could end up in the hands of a terrorism-tainted group like the P.L.O. He also opposed a rule that said the pact could be amended, possibly against America's wishes, by a two-thirds vote of participating nations. A top State Department official insisted that the U.S. "made every possible effort and then some" to strike a compromise, but gave up after most of the other nations refused to budge. The U.S. mining industry, which anticipates a rich haul of minerals such as manganese, cobalt and nickel from the seabed, was elated. Proclaimed Jeffry Amsbaugh, president of Ocean Mining Associates, a Virginia-based consortium: "It's just not a good deal."

Advocates of the treaty argue that the U.S. will suffer in the long run if it does not sign the agreement. They discount the mining industry's objections; production ceilings, for example, have been set so high that they are meaningless, and the terms for transferring technical know-how favor the seller. More important, many of these critics question the Administration's belief that American interests in navigational rights and territorial waters will be protected if the U.S. does not sign the treaty. Sums up one of the nation's foremost experts on international sea law, Professor Louis Henkin of Columbia University: "The treaty is probably the best one obtainable and is certainly better than the alternative of isolating the U.S. by not signing the agreement."

The treaty will be signed in December; since only 60 nations are needed to ratify the agreement, the pact will almost certainly become international law. Without Washington's approval, American mining companies will have no legal protection for their investments; banks will probably deny them financing unless an alternative can be found.

The Administration plans to explore the possibility of drawing up a minitreaty with other major industrialized nations to protect their claims. Critics argue that such an arrangement would be legally superseded by the Law of the Sea; it is also probable that potential partners, such as Britain and West Germany, will prefer an imperfect U.N. treaty to an American plan of questionable standing. Indeed, because of its objections to seabed-mining provisions, the Reagan Administration risks leaving the U.S. alone and adrift in the sea of international law.

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