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

Power-Based Regime Analysis 75
serious damage to the marine environment” (Deese 1978, p. 47). Scientists
concerned over plans for oil drillings and discharging of domestic wastes,
chemicals, minerals and “other byproducts of our technology by proposed
giant outflows into the deep sea” (Howard Sanders before Subcommittee
on Oceanography, quoted from Senate Report no. 451, p. 4238) gave testimony
before congressional hearings describing possible catastrophic
implications in the deep sea and were quoted in the press. 6 A 1969 study by
the National Academy of Sciences talked of catastrophic dangers for fish.
In October of 1970, when the Council on Environmental Quality
announced its ocean dumping report, the Army’s dumping was again
brought up. “Such practices could—and should—be controlled by executive
order to conform to the new guidelines,” editorialized the New York
Times (“To Save the Seas,” October 13, 1970).
Public and political attention to ocean dumping was sustained through
several congressional hearings held in 1971. A group of representatives and
senators concerned over ocean dumping, some with ties to the U.S. marine
scientific community, was organizing and carrying out an attack on the
image of the oceans as pristine and indestructible and was effectively formulating
new norms for ocean protection. 7 While ocean pollution commanded
the attention of the president and the administration, this group
of congressmen saw the opportunity to minimize and perhaps even end
ocean dumping, and to initiate a new oceans program. 8 From the point of
view of the U.S. marine scientific community, the past decade had been
dominated by “ocean rhetoric,” but the newly established National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was welcomed as an opportunity
to “get going.” 9 Heightened public and political concern for the health
of the oceans furnished them with the necessary window of opportunity. In
order to mobilize public and political support for regulation, prominent
environmentalists and experts were invited to congressional hearings, at
which they described ecological threats to and even crises in the marine
environment caused by pollution. Prominent ecologists and scientists
attacked the view that the oceans have a capacity to absorb unlimited waste
without harm to them.
This group of U.S. politicians saw the problem of ocean dumping as being
“global in scope” (Sen. Jennings Randolph, quoted in Congressional
Record: Senate, April 1, 1971, p. 9184). 10 National efforts alone would be
futile. “We are faced not with a national problem,” one politician declared,