Monday morning, June 21

The nations of the world are now facing decisions of momentous importance to man's use of the oceans for decades ahead. At issue is whether the oceans will be used rationally and equitably and for the benefit of mankind or whether they will become an arena of unrestrained exploitation and conflicting jurisdictional claims in which even the most advantaged states will be losers. . . . The stark fact is that the law of the sea is inadequate to meet the needs of modern technology and the concerns of the international community. If it is not modernized multilaterally, unilateral action and international conflict are inevitable.

Extract from President Nixon's Statement on U.S. Oceans Policy, May 23, 1970.

We do not believe it to be the task of the conference to break up the international legal order that has matured through long historical development and forms the basis for the use of the world's oceans by States. Attempts to revise that regime, which was embodied in the Geneva Convention, and to replace it with some new regimes, could seriously damage the development of international co-operation in the use of the world's oceans.

Mr. Issraelyan, USSR, in First Committee of General Assembly, December 16, 1970 (A/C. 1/PV. 1800, pp. 54-55).

As misleading as the science fiction fallacy is the prophetic fallacy, which consists in foreseeing catastrophic consequences for mankind if the Committee does not agree in the next day, in the next month or even in the next General Assembly. For some time now, visions of doom and chaos have been con

jured up in the wake of unreached agreement, only to be disproved by reality.

Mr. Guerreiro, Brazil, in Seabed Committee, March 22, 1971.

I: INTRODUCTION

As the above quotations suggest, some States fear that the world's oceans will be the scene of waste and conflict if a new Law of the Sea Conference1 fails to create a new order; others fear that a more likely outcome will be the spread of the present disorder to new areas of the law; others again, rejecting rhetoric, hyperbole and generalizations, are aware of the advantages which a sense of urgency can bring but are conscious too of the dangers of exaggerating the significance of a particular date or of linking related issues so closely together that difficulties are placed in the way of progress on any one issue.

As in most great issues of politics, domestic or international, growth is likely to take place along a line which, if it is not a golden mean, is at least somewhere between the utopian dreams of the idealists and the reactionary immobility of the realists; between the hopes and expectations of the developing States and the conservatism of the satisfied.

In the analysis which follows, it has been the writer's aim to assess the prospects of success and the consequences of failure of the 1973 Conference in full awareness of the interplay of these two forces, neither of which-whatever our personal predilection-should be underestimated. The first is typified by the words of the Chairman of the Sea-Bed Committee, Mr. Am

The UN General Assembly's decision to convene a Law of the Sea Conference is embodied in A/RES/2750 (XXV) of December 17, 1970. The Conference is provisionally scheduled for 1973 but "if the General Assembly at its twentyseventh session determines the progress of the preparatory work of the [Sea-Bed] Committee to be insufficient, it may decide to postpone the Conference"; (ibid., para. 3).