CHAPTER 8.  Global Issues I: Telecommunications, Law of the Sea,  Fishing Rights, Space Research and Development Cooperation and Space Law
 

"On the grand scale, the observable region [of space] is very much the same everywhere and in all directions -- in other words, it is homogeneous."
Edwin Powell Hubbell

Telecommunications
The greatest use of technology in space has been in telecommunications via satellites.  It was clear from the outset that no single country or small group of counties could own or control an entire global communications network relying on satellites.  This was particularly true since telecommunications in most countries are a government monopoly, and therefore susceptible to national political pressures that would in general not be acceptable to other countries.

The International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT) was formed in 1964 to operate a global network of telecommunications satellites.  (These devices receive beams of signals from points on the earth for retransmission to other points at long distances from the first.)  Earth stations for transmitting and receiving signals to and from the satellites were owned by the national carriers, generally the PTTs, or postal-telephone-telegraph monopolies.  In the United States, however, where telecommunications are in private hands, the Communications Satellite Act of 1962 set up a private corporation called COMSAT to be the U.S. member of INTELSAT.  Setting up INTELSAT in the early 1960s was an early application of science and technology to foreign affairs whose total significance goes largely unrecognized.

By 1993 INTELSAT had achieved outstanding success, with ninety-eight members, 135 user countries and 150 ground stations.  Nearly all international television then went by INTELSAT satellites along with two-thirds of international long-distance telephone calls.  INTELSAT launched its first satellite in 1965; it weighed 38 kilograms and carried 240 voice circuits.  The sixth-generation satellite weighed 1780 kilograms and had a capacity of 33,000 simultaneous conversations.

Law of the Sea
The Law of the Sea (LOS) is an ancient term of law that applies to a range of maritime and other issues addressed in modern times under the auspices of the United Nations in Geneva in 1958 at the first Law of the Sea (LOS) Conference.  Key areas of dispute were extension of national sovereignty into the seas; territorial waters; "economic zone" (for fish, minerals), right of peaceful transit of vessels on the high seas, near land and through straits and freedom of the seas, including coastal waters, for scientific research.

To this list was soon added rights to the profits from seabed mining after deep-sea research indicated that a wealth of minerals, including manganese, lay at the bottom of the oceans waiting only for the countries with the capable technology to go down and get it, lift it up and sell it.  The issues of economic zones for fish and minerals and of rights to perform research and development and seabed mining all have S&T components.

By 1967 the new seabed mining issue began to become enshrined at the United Nations by third-world rhetoric.  In line with suggestions for internationalizing the ocean floor -- as the high seas have been internationalized -- the deep seabed was then termed by some "the common heritage of mankind."  Colonization of the ocean floor was deplored in the same way as colonization of Antarctica or the moon.

The Third LOS Conference that opened in New York in 1973 eventually came within an inch of achieving agreement on all issues, including seabed mining (via the mechanism of an international consortium).  Negotiations continued until 1982, when many LDCs signed the treaty; but the United States and some others rejected it (mainly on the issue of deep seabed mining), and seventeen other nations, including the USSR, abstained.  This treaty extended territorial waters out to twelve nautical miles, assured innocent passage through about a hundred straits worldwide and proclaimed national coastal fishing rights out to 200 miles and oil and gas rights to 350 miles.

By 1994 159 nations had signed the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea and sixty had ratified it, allowing it to enter into force later the same year.  The U.S. government negotiated concessions on the mining issue: lower royalties to be paid by mining companies to LDCs, no requirement to turn over the companies' technology to other countries and removal of production limits.

Fishing Rights
Because of the vast commercial importance of fish, fishing rights off coasts and in international waters have long been the diplomat's stock in trade, embodied in a multitude of treaties and international agreements.

The LOS Conference of 1958 and its successor in 1960 (LOS-II) achieved much, but agreement on the issue of the territorial sea and economic zones proved elusive.  Individual countries were declaring sovereignty of various degrees over waters off their coast up to 200 miles, far beyond the traditional twelve-mile limit based on the range of an eighteenth-century cannon.  Fish and minerals, including oil, were now the grounds, not longer-range cannons.  The United States declared a 200-mile offshore fishing limit in 1977.

Improved technology enabled countries to send larger fishing fleets farther from home and to process and preserve the fish without having to go back to port.  These practices perhaps led to overfishing, endangering the survival of certain species.  A more pertinent S&T issue is the wandering nature of fish like salmon.  Although they generally live in the wide seas, these fish return to fresh-water rivers to spawn.  Such peculiar habits raise questions about which country can claim the fish and when, foreign affairs questions that can only be understood and tentatively answered with the aid of fisheries scientists.

The United States has had fishing rights agreements with Canada, Mexico and Central American countries; with eleven countries concerning North Atlantic fishing rights; with seventeen concerning whaling; with Canada and Japan regulating fishing in the North Pacific; and with those two countries and the USSR regulating taking fur seals there (hardly fish, but involving similar issues).

Space Research and Development Cooperation
The United States has used its transient monopoly in certain technologies like nuclear energy and space as incentives for other countries to join in multilateral technology-sharing (or technology-limiting) programs.  In all cases the monopoly has been brief, the sharing or limiting too limited to achieve lasting cooperation.   The U.S. monopoly has dissolved in the face of foreign technology development and because of what were perceived to be, and often were, unacceptable conditions for cooperation required by the United States.

The USSR stole the world march in space with its launch of Sputnik in 1957, and in 1959 called for an international space study conference.  The United States was unenthusiastic, but by 1963 it was already proposing its own multilateral space endeavors at the United Nations.  These followed just a decade after the U.S. Atoms for Peace initiative.  By the time Americans landed on the moon in 1969 the United States had won the space public relations race if not the technical race.  Even the spectacular success of the Apollo program with its men in space and on the moon had to contend with the superior throw weight of some Soviet missiles and in the longer orbital staying power of Soviet astronauts in the MIR spacecraft.

A sidelight on the popularity of U.S. space endeavors: the triumphal visit of the Enterprise space shuttle to Europe in 1983.  The Enterprise was not even an orbiting shuttle, but a mockup of subsequent versions.  Yet its visit to the Paris Air Show, followed by landings in the United Kingdom and Germany, plus a hastily arranged appearance in Italy at the urgent request of the U.S. Embassy, was a resounding success.

Perhaps by the 1980s U.S. domestic assessment of NASA and the U.S. space programSpace program  was approaching the ho-hum stage; there had been a surfeit of launches and astronaut appearances on American television.  The Europeans and others were far from saturated in 1983, however.  Embassies competed to get their capitals on astronauts' schedules.  Throngs turned out for their arrivals and conferences.  The most reticent local officials eagerly accepted ambassadors' invitations to dinners in the astronauts' honor.  For the most part the astronauts acquitted themselves admirably, portraying the red-blooded American hero to the fullest.  In a sense, of course, they were heroes.

The visit of the shuttle Enterprise to Bonn in 1983 coincided with the three-hundredth anniversary of German settlement in America, already an event of emphasis on embassy schedules.  Over a dreary Whitsun weekend, when many Germans were on vacation, over 300,000 people visited Bonn-Cologne airport to see the Enterprise perched on top of its Boeing 747 carrier.  All the other embassies' science and air attachÈs came to see.  Later, ten thousand Germans stood in the rain to watch it fly off.  The public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy called it the tricentennial event of the first magnitude -- bigger and better than anything else the embassy had programmed.

The crew of the space shuttle flight that had carried aloft the German space laboratory D-1German space laboratory D-1  along with the first non-American astronaut, a German, came to Bonn, where they were fÍted by the American ambassador.  The German astronaut had been top news in Germany for days, and each evening during the flight the eight o'clock television news began with a report of his well-being and activities in space.  This 1983 event was concurrently recognized as the anniversary of twenty-one years of cooperation between the United States and its oldest space research partner, Germany.

Space Station
President Reagan proposed a manned space station in his 1984 state of the union address and invited foreign participation.  The station would be a permanent fixture in space 200 miles above the earth.  The space shuttle would first transport the materials to build the station, then ferry scientist-astronauts to its laboratories and living spaces for extended stays.

The cost to put the station into orbit by 1994 was originally estimated to be $8 billion.  The United States and eleven foreign partners -- Japan, Canada, and members of the European Space Agency (ESA) -- signed the formal agreement in 1988.  By 1990 the cost had risen to $23 billion shared as follows: United States $16 billion, European partners $4.2 billion, Japan $2 billion and Canada $1 billion.

Design delays and increased cost projections have continued to plague the project.9  In 1991 the American Physical Society, the country's leading association of physical scientists, claimed that space station science could be carried out far more cheaply on earth or by means of unmanned platforms.  By 1993 thirteen more scientific societies in a joint statement condemned space station on the basis of scientific value.  As recently as 1998 the American Society of Cell Biologists discounted the worth of the station for biological experiments.  The House of Representatives came within one vote of canceling the whole project in 1993, after which the United States redesigned the program and opened it to participation by RussiaRussia  as a full partner and financial contributor.  The Soviet Union had launched the first space station in 1971 and put the large MIRMIR  station aloft in 1986.  Eventually BrazilBrazil:space station  also became a participant in the space station, and ItalyItaly:space station  took part in addition to its participation as a member of ESA.

Costs continued to rise and Russia's economic problems prevented it from meeting its financial commitments.  NASA made up much of the difference.  In 1998 the Russians launched ZaryaZarya , the basis for beginning assembly of the station, and the United States followed with Unity, a node or fitting to which many of the subsequent components will be attached.  Altogether forty-five space flights are planned to build the station, thirty-four by the U.S. shuttle and eleven by Russian rockets.  Target date for completion is now 2004 and the total estimated cost $40 billion.

Space Law
The technological advancement of putting objects, animals, then men into "outer space," orbiting like miniature moons about the earth, raised whole new fields of endeavor for foreign service officers and international lawyers.  Issues in the Law of the Sea such as the international nature of the high seas were centuries old, but those of "outer space" began only in 1957 with the launch of the Soviet Sputnik.

"Outer space" was initially hard to define: it is roughly above that region 70-100 miles above the earth where earth-launched satellites can begin to orbit and airplanes can no longer fly.  By 1958 the United Nations had proposed that uses of outer space be for peaceful purposes only, that the laws generally recognized by civilized nations on earth apply also to outer space, and that no nation could impose sovereignty in outer space.

By 1959 the United Nations set up a new committee called the UN Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), which eventually formed two subcommittees, one on science and technology and the other on law.  The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 specifically prohibited nuclear weapons in outer space and in that sense was the first "space treaty."  The United Nations followed this agreement the same year with a Declaration of Legal Principles Governing the Exploration and Use of Outer Space.  It elaborated on the work of 1958 and 1959, specifically reserving exploration of outer space and the "celestial bodies" for the benefit of all men and not as an instrument of sovereignty.  In this respect, the declaration extended the principles of international or high seas maritime law and law of the sea to outer space.

The first treaty devoted primarily to outer space was the monumental UN Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.  The treaty entered into wide force beginning in 1967.  The United States and other countries were well served by the United Nations in the case of this and the subsequent outer space treaties.
This 1967 treaty provided:
--no sovereignty in outer space,
--extension of existing international law to outer space,
--banning of nuclear weapons in outer space,
--assistance to astronauts,
--liability for countries' space activities,
--environmental protection,
--registration of space flights and activities and
--inspection.

Space experts at the United Nations added three further treaties to make a quartet that have found wide approval and ratification.  (The United States has ratified all four.)  They were to a great extent the elaboration of principles laid down in the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

1968: Agreement on the Rescue and Return of Astronauts and the Return of Objects Launched into Outer Space;
1972: Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects; and
1975: Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space (in force in 1978).

The Liability Treaty has been of particular use since space debris has sometimes fallen to earth.   Pieces of the rocket used to launch the U.S. Skylab in 1973 fell out of orbit in 1974, presumably into the ocean, and in 1982 in western Australia. A Soviet space object crashed to earth in Canada.  It carried a nuclear power source that caused anxiety until it was found and removed and Canada indemnified.

The UN COPUOS prepared a draft of a fifth treaty that has not found universal acceptance, in particular not by the United States.  This was a convention that would make the moon and celestial bodies the common heritage of mankind (along with the high seas and perhaps the ocean floor).  They would be subject to no exclusive economic or political rights.  An international regime would be set up to manage the development of space resources.

Use of Science and Technology for Intelligence
The technological development of weapons is generally excluded here as outside the realm of technology's impact on foreign affairs.  The interest is mainly where science and technology have directly impinged upon international negotiations and political relations rather than defense and military affairs, as they have in nuclear nonproliferation.  Readers will recognize the importance to the day-to-day conduct of foreign affairs, however, of gathering information by radar, air sampling, satellite imagery and interception of signals.  Progress in decryption and encryption of communications has also had great impact.

One case is worth mentioning.  The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, one of the two main Salt I agreements between the United States and the USSR, makes specific mention in Article XII of "national technical means of verification."  It was only the advance of intelligence-gathering systems "popularly thought of as reconnaissance photography from satellites operating in outer space and as remote detectors of various kinds," that allowed the United States to drop its demand for on-site inspections that the Soviets would not permit.  Article V of the companion SALT I agreement to limit strategic offensive arms also permits verification of treaty terms by such "national technical means."  Thus science and technology did indirectly but decisively affect this aspect of foreign affairs.