The Oceans and Environmental Security: Shared U.S. And Russian Perspectives

by James Broadus (Editor), Raphael V. Vartanov (Editor), Matthew J. Lamourie (Contribution by), Tom Tietenburg (Contribution by), Artemy A. Saguirian (Contribution by)

Overview

The concept of environmental security, drawing on the widely understood notion of international strategic interdependence (in facing, for example, threats of nuclear war or economic collapse) is gaining currency as a way of thinking about international environmental management.

In 1989, the Institute for World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Marine Policy Center of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution instituted a joint project to examine environmental security as it applies to the world's oceans. The Oceans and Environmental Security is a unified expression of their findings.

The oceans, as global commons, are of central importance to issues of international environmental security. Critical problems are those that are likely to destabilize normal relations between nations and provoke international countermeasures. As such, the book focuses on seven specific concerns:

• land-based marine pollution
• North Pacific fisheries depletion
• hazardous materials transport
• nuclear contamination
• the Arctic Ocean
• the Southern Ocean and Antarctica
• the Law of the Sea

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610913355
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	04/24/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	350
File size:	11 MB
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About the Author

James M. Broadus was director of the Marine Policy Center, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Raphael V. Vartanov is head of the Section on Ocean Development and Environment, Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences.

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The Oceans and Environmental Security

Shared U.S. and Russian Perspectives

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By James M. Broadus, Raphael V. Vartanov

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1994 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-335-5

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

IN THE WAKE OF the Cold War, the global security agenda is shifting from a predominantly military conception of threat to a growing sense of urgency about economic, social, and environmental challenges. Despite the many signs of improving trust and cooperation between the United States and the former Soviet republics, there has been little apparent easing of our collective anxiety about the world's habitability for future generations. As the complexity and interdependence of the many factors involved become more apparent, so, too, does the inadequacy of our knowledge and of our current legal and institutional framework to support the sustainable global solutions that are required.

The need for greater openness, awareness, and cooperation is particularly pressing with respect to the natural environment, where the processes at work cannot be confined within national borders or readily reversed merely by a change of national policy. Recognition of these qualities and the potential for their exploitation give environmental affairs new geopolitical significance.

This reorientation is seen throughout the traditional defense and security establishments as they seek to define new roles for themselves in the post–Cold War world (Weston 1990; Oswald 1992). New norms of "military humanitarianism" are emerging, and American troops have been involved in an unprecedented series of relief efforts for both man-made and natural disasters (Weiss and Campbell 1991). Alliances devoted to military and economic security arrangements, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), are launching a variety of environmental affairs programs.

In the United States, a 1991 White House memorandum signed by President Bush referred to "dramatic changes in US defense planning" and the growing interest "in our intelligence services tackling new issues and problems," headed by "environment, natural resource scarcities" (White House Memorandum, cited in Funke 1992). Legislation for a Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program to convert strategic defense industries to work on environmental threats was introduced in the US Senate by Senate Armed Services Chairman Sam Nunn (D-GA), who spoke of "a new and different threat to our national security emerging—the destruction of the environment" (Nunn, cited in Funke 1992). The US military services, meanwhile, are devoting much greater attention to their own environmental practices (Kelso 1991; Broadus 1991; Shepherd 1993; Kraska 1993), and such military intelligence assets as subsea hydrophone acoustic data and nuclear submarine operations under the polar ice are for the first time being made available for civilian science (Ocean Science News 1993; Washington Letter of Oceanography 1993; Marine Technology Society Journal 1994).

In Russia, changes of this nature have been somewhat slower in coming, but the Russian military is nonetheless acutely aware of the country's environmental problems and of its own responsibility to contribute to their solution by bringing to bear the scientific and technological capabilities and assets that it controlled for so long. One example of recent initiatives in this direction is the State Committee for Special Underwater Operations Dealing with Nuclear Contamination, which is chaired by Tengiz Borisov, a senior officer in the Russian Navy ("Delayed-Action Mines in the Seas" 1993; WHOI 1993).

Moreover, increased attention is being given to armed conflict itself as an environmental threat (Schachte 1991; Oxman 1991; Caggiano 1993). An ominous example was Iraq's intentional release of Kuwaiti oil into the Persian Gulf in 1991 in an apparent attempt to impede a military assault and to contaminate supplies of Saudi Arabian drinking water (Readman et al. 1992; Plante 1992). Issues of responsibility, liability, and compensation for the resulting environmental damages were simplified somewhat in that case because a vanquished Iraq was forced militarily to accept terms of disengagement (see UN Sec. Res. 687 and 692 in International Legal Materials 1991a, 1991b).

Similar issues arise in other cases involving the marine environment, outside the context of armed conflict, and resolution of these issues cannot depend on military victories. Quite the opposite; an important goal of their resolution is to avoid or contain international conflict and to prevent or minimize environmental damage, to enhance environmental security.

Imagine the complications if resources and livelihoods in the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of damages from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. How would international institutions have assured the proper assignment of responsibility and a fair compensation for losses? Experience with transboundary effects from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster suggests that international mechanisms for dealing with accidental environmental damage are neither well developed nor effective. In fact, widely acknowledged mechanisms to govern oil transportation practices, to assign responsibility for accidental oil spill damages, to guide the resolution of disputes, and to counsel the allocation of compensation have evolved since World War II. Comparable mechanisms for the much more complex, potentially more dangerous problem of other hazardous seaborne cargoes or for transboundary toxic releases have yet to be worked out.

A similar problem involves contamination from nuclear devices. Published reports estimate that fifty nuclear weapons and twenty-three reactors have been lost at sea, all by the US and Soviet navies. In 1989, for instance, a Soviet Mike-class nuclear-powered submarine carrying two plutonium-tipped torpedoes sank in the Norwegian Sea. Iceland worried that mere suspicion of radioactive contamination of its fish products could damage its export markets. More recently, Russian authorities disclosed that a heavily armed Yankee-class nuclear submarine, which sank 500 miles east of Bermuda in 1986, is broken up on the sea floor and is leaking radioactivity into strong ocean currents (Broad 1994). Revelations of three decades of secret Soviet dumping of radioactive materials in the arctic seas have occasioned alarm among the region's indigenous populations and environmentalists everywhere, who have scarcely been reassured by preliminary scientific assessments finding no evidence of any regional-scale threat to human health or the environment (WHOI Conference Statement 1993). In October 1993, a dispute broke out between Japan and Russia over continued Russian dumping of low-level radioactive wastes in the Sea of Japan (Sanger 1993).

The concept of environmental security helps us think clearly about such problems. It draws on the widely understood ideas of international, strategic interdependence (in facing threats of nuclear war or economic collapse) to focus attention on the similarly shared exposure to threats from global environmental degradation. Implicit in the concept is a direct link to conventional understanding of international security arising from the potential for conflict over resource use and environmental practices.

Early in our collaboration we formulated a working definition:

Environmental security is the reasonable assurance of protection against threats to national well-being or the common interests of the international community associated with environmental damage.

Critical problems of international environmental security are those that are likely to destabilize normal relations between nations and to provoke international countermeasures.

EVOLVING NOTIONS OF SECURITY

Security is a central concept of all politics. Individuals, groups, and political communities alike prefer safety to danger, predictability to unpredictability. Traditionally, security has involved assuring the physical survival of a political unit and of the individuals or groups populating it. Security has also included maintaining (and often expanding) the territorial domain of the unit, protecting its basic institutional structure against change imposed from outside, and assuring that domestic systems of command, control, production, and distribution are not disrupted by external forces.

A critical component here is not just undesirability itself but the fact of imposition by others. States wish to avoid any undesirable outcome, but those stemming from internal choice or error do not raise security concerns in quite the same way. Through conciliation, deterrence, and defense, each political community attempts to protect human life, territorial possessions, institutional continuity, economic viability, internal order, and a distinctive way of life.

Traditional writings on world politics, whether "realist" or "idealist," tend to define security in terms of national security—that is, from the point of view of the individual political unit. In the twentieth century, an emerging alternative conception treats security as an international system-level objective. Proponents of collective security, followers of the Grotian tradition of a "society of states" bound by common rules and adherents of the postwar "interdependence school," all believe that it is possible to combine nation-state autonomy with common rules to avoid or lessen armed conflict.

The national and international approaches are not irreconcilable but can reinforce each other. It has long been understood that unilateral actions intended to enhance security might in fact reduce it by provoking countermeasures. The dangers of the arms race were widely understood before 1914, and notions of a "security dilemma," in which actions viewed as defensive by the doer are perceived as aggressive by others, began to be articulated after World War II (Richardson 1938; Wolfers 1952; Herz 1959; Jervis 1978). The resulting notion of "strategic interdependence" describes situations where outcomes are determined not by the choice of any one player (be it an individual, a group, or a political community) but by the combination of choices made by all (e.g., Von Neumann and Morgenstern 1944, 1953; Shelling 1963; Shubik 1975). The focus on mutual dependence in avoiding the common aversion that underlay the postwar concept of a balance of terror was elaborated, when both superpowers developed second-strike capability, into the aptly named condition of mutually assured destruction.

More recently, stress on common aversion and the system level have converged toward the concept of environmental security, founded on a belief that individuals, groups, and political communities cannot be secure if they fail to take account of adverse consequences that may result from human behavior affecting the environment. Precursor notions may be traced back into the late eighteenth century, when Malthus (1798) provided early visions of disasters due to human populations' outgrowing of available food supplies. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers on geopolitics stressed the importance of climate, topography, and location for the organization, expansion, and perpetuation of political units (e.g., Mahan 1897; Mackinder 1904; Huntington 1924; Haushofer 1932a, 1932b). Though all these writers focused on constraints imposed by nature, they usually regarded these constraints as manageable through technology.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY

Only in the 1960s did concern about the natural environment congeal in the form of respect for the limits imposed by nature. The first wave of writings warned of the dangers of environmental degradation and advocated policies to avoid catastrophe, but they did not explicitly link environmental with security concerns (e.g., Carson 1962; Kennan 1970; Falk 1971; Meadows et al. 1972). Yet certain commonalities existed and could be used to bring the two concepts together. In particular, these writings and the responses they evoked all suggested a situation with some features reminiscent of the balance of terror. There was an obvious common aversion and enough analysis to show that the undesired outcome could not be avoided unilaterally, but only through compatible choices by many or all.

These similarities made it possible to merge security and environmental concerns in two ways. The first was a fairly simple stretch of traditional security notions to include maintenance of ecological balance within countries. This encouraged a new look at population pressures, soil erosion, deforestation, overexploitation of renewable resources, desertification, drought, and climate change as possible sources of international tension as people migrated or governments sought new territory in search of resources (e.g., Choucri and North 1975; Ullman 1990; Myers 1986, 1987a, 1987b, 1989; Homer-Dixon, Boutwell, and Rathjens 1993; Suhrke 1993). Environmental disruptions might even create new or exacerbate existing national social pressures sufficiently to inspire a challenge to the legitimacy of a government unable to provide sufficient resources to a needy population.

Yet the global or regional nature of many environmental problems has encouraged a broader conception, a notion of international environmental security requiring mutual self-restraint and cooperation among states (e.g., WCED 1987; Mathews 1989; Westing 1989). Just as the maintenance of international security requires acknowledgment of other countries' legitimate concerns for their own integrity and continuity, the maintenance of international environmental security requires acknowledgment that all humans exist on one planet and that all must help preserve its ability to sustain life. Just as avoiding an all-out nuclear exchange becomes a first priority of superpowers, so avoiding general environmental collapse becomes a first priority of all responsible states.

The most prominent efforts at elaborating the concept of international environmental security were made by the Socialist International, whose 18th Congress in 1989 produced the document "Toward Environmental Security: A Strategy for Long-Term Survival," and by the Soviet government under Mikhail Gorbachev. The Gorbachev team, eager to gain the trust of the United States and other democratic societies, seized upon environmental affairs as an arena in which they could demonstrate the Soviet Union's good faith and even stake out a position of international leadership. In a speech at Murmansk in October 1987, Gorbachev called for the establishment of an "arctic zone of peace," which provided the impetus for regional scientific and environmental cooperation among the Arctic and Nordic states. In turn, international attention to these and other environmental initiatives strengthened the Soviet leaders' hand as they challenged a massive network of entrenched interests to reverse many decades of systematic environmental neglect and abuse at home. Glasnost having begun to take root, the 1986 Chernobyl accident propelled environmental issues to the top ranks of the Soviet domestic agenda. They have remained there since, through the tumultuous transition to the successor government of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and have also continued to be a centerpiece of Russia's international policies.

When the Yeltsin government confirmed in late 1992 the thirty-year history of extensive nuclear dumping by the Soviets in the seas and shallow coastal waters of the Arctic and when continued Russian dumping was observed in the Sea of Japan in late 1993, the revelations sparked serious studies and sober debate about the extent of the radioactive contamination and the degree of risk posed to human health and the ocean environment. Continuing cooperative efforts and dialogue provide encouraging signs of increasing candor and cooperation in the handling of international environmental affairs. At the same time, they exemplify how far we remain from achieving a level of scientific certainty, political consensus, and shared legal and regulatory norms that is adequate to address issues of global environmental security effectively.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Oceans and Environmental Security by James M. Broadus, Raphael V. Vartanov. Copyright © 1994 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
About the Contributors
 
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Land-based Marine Pollution: The Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea
Chapter 3. Living Resource Problems: The North Pacific
Chapter 4. Hazardous Materials Transport
Chapter 5. Radioactivity in the Oceans
Chapter 6. Environmental Protection for the Arctic Ocean
Chapter 7. The Southern Ocean
Chapter 8. The Law of the Sea
Chapter 9. Conclusions
 
Notes
References
List of Abbreviations
Index