FOREIGN RELATIONS: Disarming the Penguins

For an area of the world bigger than the U.S. and Western Europe combined, the U.S., the Soviet Union and ten other nations agreed last week to disarmament and a wide-open, no-strings-attached inspection system as well. The vast (5,500,000 sq. mi.) continent of Antarctica was guaranteed for 34 years as a peaceful scientific preserve in a treaty signed with full diplomatic pomp in a State Department auditorium. Nuclear explosions are specifically forbidden; any signatory may send an observer anywhere in the Antarctica at any time to look at anything.

Underlying the good fellowship that produced agreement in seven weeks of negotiations was the fact that the U.S. and the Soviet Union do not claim any part of Antarctica. Nor do they recognize the often overlapping claims of seven other nations, which are “frozen” for the treaty’s duration. Also simplifying demilitarization is the absence of military bases (some 50 scientific outposts hug the coastline) and a population in which penguins enormously outnumber people.

But the unique circumstances of Antarctica did not dampen enthusiasm to apply the treaty’s principles elsewhere. Said the Russians in a statement issued by the Soviet embassy in Washington: “The significance of this agreement goes beyond the limits of Antarctica and can be a good example for adopting similar decisions in respect to other regions of the globe.” Australia’s Ambassador Howard Beale raised the intriguing possibility that the treaty might serve as a model for another uninhabited, potentially disputed region: “the outer reaches of space.”