Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

Interest-Based Regime Analysis 91
Stockholm conference, Hawkes (1972a, p. 738) reported: “The many environmental
meetings that have preceded Stockholm have shown that
Americans tend to take a much gloomier view of the situation than do
Europeans. . . . The more apocalyptic visions of the future remain a minority
taste in Britain.” 5 The U.S. government had evidently taken up this idea.
A former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations later noted caustically:
“We have become great producers and distributors of crisis. The world
environment crisis, the world population crisis, the world food crisis, are
in the main American discoveries—or inventions—opinions differ.”
(Moynihan 1978, p. 131)
Especially in the eyes of China, Brazil, and India, the affluent Western
societies, which were facing severe, self-inflicted environmental problems,
intended to use the Stockholm conference to impose new environmental
regulations on developing countries that would cause industrial and economic
stagnation. Brazil’s foreign minister argued at a “Group of 77” meeting
that global pollution was “a by-product of the intensity of industrial
activity in the highly developed countries” (Hawkes 1972a, p. 737). At a
meeting preceding Stockholm, some developing countries even saw global
environmental standards as a deliberate strategy of the developed countries
aimed at halting the industrial and economic development of poor countries
(ibid.). In Stockholm, developing countries responded by launching a verbal
attack on the developed countries, especially the United States, and
demanded compensation and assistance in development. According to
American mass media, this was an “unexpected theme” (Hill 1972).
As regards ocean dumping, the view of the group of developed countries
and that of the group of developing countries differed dramatically.
Developing countries generally did not see themselves as polluters of any
significance and did not consider ocean pollution their problem. Nor did
scientists from developing countries pay much attention to ocean pollution.
A spokesman for scientists from the developing countries had explained in
a hearing before the U.S. Congress: “Ocean and higher atmosphere pollution,
that is to say the two phenomena with the greatest global effects, have
almost not been considered [by Third World scientists]. I would dare to
interpret this fact as the feeling that the less developed countries are judging
themselves only in a very small measure responsible for the occurrence
of these pollutions and that therefore the solutions should also be undertaken
by the industrialized countries.” 6 In his comments on the Stockholm