Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of the future? And, whatever the answers to these questions and more, this conference was
planned for 1959 - the year, as it turned out, of the Cuban revolution.
With the help of the neatly typed diaries of Brian Roberts, a senior member of the British
delegation to the Antarctic Treaty conference, we gain some insights into the febrile atmo-
sphere (and his personality type). As he confided:
It is not possible to continue this record in the way I hoped. … What spare time I can find is
spent drafting telegrams for the Foreign Office or preparing memoranda for Sir Esler [Head
of the British Delegation]. These are usually finished by about half past one or 2 o'clock
in the morning and by that time I want only to go to bed exhausted. … I wake up from a
nightmare of papers suddenly realising that I am not in the stuffy conference room.
Surrounded by potted palm trees, the delegation including Roberts knew that some kind
of political-legal-scientific settlement was vital. The Cubans had their revolution; now the
Antarctic needed one. As a claimant state, austerity-weakened Britain had invested hun-
dreds of thousands of pounds in creating and sustaining a scientific and logistical pro-
gramme designed to keep at bay two South American rival claimants - Argentina and
Chile. But the South American states were never going to drop their 'claims' to the Antarc-
tic Peninsula region. Unlike Britain, the South American states were not managing a dimin-
ishing imperial portfolio, some of which was problematic, and were not embroiled in de-
fence commitments around the world from Korea to West Germany. The British Treasury
was demanding savings, and Roberts and the team needed a formula with the imprimatur
of the United States that would be both cost-saving and face-saving. Failure to find some
kind of international agreement would lead to Antarctic withdrawal. In 1958, the Treasury
made it clear to the Foreign Office and Colonial Offices that further investment was not
going to be sanctioned to defend a remote and uninhabited part of the British Empire with
questionable resource value.
All the participants brought their own agendas regarding a possible settlement. For the
Soviets, for example, simply participating was significant given earlier attempts by the sev-
en claimant states and the United States to try and exclude them from shaping the future
governance of the Antarctic. The Soviet delegation was determined to ensure that their
non-recognition policy of existing claims was respected and was eager that the region be
demilitarized, especially given American plans (however tentative) to consider the possib-
ility of nuclear testing. The southern hemispheric states such as Argentina and Australia
were deeply concerned about nuclear testing and covert submarine activities in the South-
ern Ocean. Smaller countries such as Belgium and Norway were eager to be represented
even if, in the case of Norway, the Euro-Arctic region was a more pressing priority. Fin-
