To outer space and Antarctica, the ocean floor has now been added as a nuclear-free zone, which is as much as can be said for the treaty which the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed last week banning nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction from the sea-bed. The contribution that this pact can make to the nuclear disarmament that the rest of the world is yearning for will be practically nil. In fact, every one of the nuclear limitation treaties which the U.S. and Russia have put through so far has only been a non-armament move aimed at preventing the non-nuclear countries from acquiring atomic weapons rather than a step towards limiting their own armaments. If Washington and Moscow have agreed not to install nuclear weapons in outer space and Antarctica and on the ocean floor, it is because they feel there is no military advantage to be gained by doing so. Under the latest treaty all that they have committed themselves to do is not to “implant or emplace” nuclear weapons on the bed of the sea, in other words not to erect permanent missile launching pads on the ocean floor. Who would want to erect them there anyway? They would make easy targets for the enemy.
