The Geopolitics of Deep Oceans by John Hannigan

Author:John Hannigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2015-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

Box 3.1 Raising the Red Star

One of the more unsavoury examples of military activity being carried out under the pretext of deep-sea exploration and discovery took place in the early 1970s. In the summer of 1974, Summa Corporation, owned and controlled by the reclusive American billionaire Howard Hughes, launched the Glomar Explorer (not to be confused with the Glomar Challenger), a massive ship built by Global Marine. The stated purpose of the Glomar Explorer's voyage was the commercial recovery of manganese nodules from the sea floor. In reality, its real aim of Project Jennifer (its CIA code name) was to raise the Red Star, a nuclear-armed Soviet submarine that had gone down in the North Pacific 750 miles northwest of Hawaii. As it happened, the salvage operation was bungled, with the badly damaged submarine falling apart more than a mile from its resting place. David Helvarg (2006: 17–20) reports that Project Jennifer provoked an unexpected outcome. To lend credibility to its cover story, the CIA placed dozens of enthusiastic articles about the prospects for mining the vast mineral wealth on the ocean floor in scientific journals and major periodicals such as Business Week, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. This publicity contributed significantly to invigorating the commercial race to mine the oceans. It prompted the formation of several consortia6 in the early 1970s dedicated to deep-sea manganese nodule mining. More significantly, it sparked a political backlash against manganese nodule mining at the ongoing UNCLOS III talks in Caracas, Venezuela (see Chapter 2).

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