RUSSIAN MISSION TO CLAIM ARCTIC SEA-BED IN BID TO DRILL FOR OIL, GAS
4 OTHER 'ARCTIC' NATIONS SAY MOVE IS MISGUIDED, FEAR RUSSIA TRYING TO UNILATERALLY ALTER MARITIME TREATIES
7 August 2007

Russia has launched an exploration mission to the North Pole, in an effort to plant a flag at the sea bottom and claim the land (and by extension the resources that lie beneath the sea-bed). Some of the world's most extensive reserves of natural gas and possibly petroleum are believed to lie beneath Arctic Ocean sea-bed.

Five nations border the Arctic Ocean, and each has laid out legal claims to part of the territory leading to the North Pole, though in legal and technical terms, the Pole is far enough from any actual continental land-mass to be well into international waters. At present, no international body manages the resources found at the bottom of the Arctic Sea, or their extraction or commerce relating to them.

Russia has put for the argument that according to studies of faultlines and major tectonic plates, the Arctic Ocean sea-bed is part of the continental shelf extending north from Russia, to the Pole. This would not actually place the resources under the sea at the open disposal of Russia, as territorial waters are not measured in this way out in the open sea.

Sergei Balyasnikov, a spokesman for the Arctic and Antarctic research institute that prepared the expedition, told the AP: "For the first time in history people will go down to the sea bed under the North Pole," adding: "It's like putting a flag on the moon." The comment is a clear reference to the pioneering American expedition to the lunar surface, and an attempt to assuage fears that Russia is conducting the expedition as a "land grab" as some have suggested.

According to CNN's reporting, "Russian scientists hope to dive in two mini-submarines beneath the pole to a depth of more than 13,200 feet, and drop a metal capsule containing the Russian flag on the sea bed."

The cable news service also adds that the Russian government is claiming 460,000 square miles of the Arctic shelf as Russian geological territory, in the hopes of securing as Russian resources the estimated 10 billion tons of oil and gas thought to be waiting for extraction under the sea-bed of the Arctic Ocean. [s]

• CNN: "Russia to sink flag to Arctic Sea floor in oil, land grab"

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Major ideologically-driven revolutions have sought to implant Utopian movements where authoritarian regimes once stood, since the 18th century, across the world. All too often, they have brought about new authoritarian regimes, which view dissenters as immoral or unthinking pawns of the old regime, and therefore, a universal threat.

Now, Foreign Policy magazine has asked the question of whether "development", as an international policy agenda, is becoming the new universalizing ideology, and whether it is given to the same dangerous weaknesses of reasoning that made totalitarian systems of the 20th century into such bloody attacks on humanity. [Full Story]