Torpedo for the Seabed Treaty

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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."