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

9
Explaining Regime Change
The Change of the Global Ocean Dumping Regime
The global ocean dumping regime changed in reasonably identifiable stages.
In one early stage, Greenpeace focused international public opinion on radwaste
disposal and forced the issue onto the international environmental
agenda. Greenpeace was an adept practitioner of public diplomacy, and it
used international public opinion as an effective political instrument in
shaping and influencing regime development.
Greenpeace’s campaign reflected widespread public concern about radwaste
disposal. In the 1980s, supporters and opponents of radwaste disposal
were in agreement that protests against dumping should be seen as
manifestations of international public opinion. “Public opinion,” one commentator
noted in the journal Nuclear Engineering International, “can find
expression in policy not only through appeals to government, but also
through direct intervention. The seamen can be condemned for taking the
law into their own hands, but their action is only a symptom of an underlying
public concern which is apparent world-wide and which stochastic
assurances of safety have done little to assuage.” (Cruickshank 1983, pp.
13–14) In almost identical words, the pro-environmentalism journal
AMBIO observed that “even though the moratorium was legally non-binding,
trade unions in Britain and throughout the world heeded the message
of international opinion” (Branch 1984, p. 330). According to the British
press, the Spanish protests and demonstrations against the dumping
planned for the summer 1983 had “strong British and international support”
(Cemlyn-Jones 1983). And, as the Secretary General of the British
seamen explained to the readers of the London Times, the seamen had
international if not worldwide support: “The NUS has been inundated