U.S. and Soviets Still Trying to Agree on Border in Icy Waters Off Alaska

Largely overlooked amid such life-and-death issues as nuclear arms control, diplomats from the United States and the Soviet Union have been negotiating since 1981 over the precise location of the border between the two countries in the icy waters between Alaska and Siberia.

At issue are about 15,000 square nautical miles of open sea, including some potentially rich underwater oil deposits. The history of the disputed waters stretches back more than 100 years and features naturalist John Muir, one of the early explorers of the Yosemite Valley, and a Soviet ship called Red October.

Right-wing American political groups, suspicious of the intentions of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, have accused the State Department of preparing to give away sovereign U.S. territory.

And for the Soviets, the negotiations have important national security implications because Moscow is engaged in virtually identical talks with Norway over a disputed stretch of the Berents Sea, which controls the access routes to the Soviet Union’s largest and most important naval bases. American officials are convinced that Moscow is determined not to yield in the talks with the United States to avoid setting a precedent that could be applied to its talks with Norway.

The dispute’s origins reach to 1867, when czarist Russia sold Alaska to the United States. The two countries then had no particular incentive to be precise about the boundary because, with both countries claiming the customary three-mile limit, the territorial waters did not overlap.

But in 1977, Washington and Moscow both proclaimed 200-mile “exclusive economic zones,” following a newly recognized principle of international law that permitted nations to claim fish and mineral resources up to 200 miles off shore. The economic zones overlapped, and incidents between U.S. and Soviet fishing fleets erupted almost immediately.

So the nations found it necessary to determine the exact location of the 1867 line. President Reagan, hoping to head off what in that arctic climate could be termed a truly cold war, approved the start of negotiations to settle the rival claims. The two sides have met five times, most recently last October.

According to State Department officials, there are two internationally recognized techniques used to draw lines on maps in polar regions. One defines a line as the arc of a “great circle”--a circle whose center is at the center of the Earth. The other uses “rhumb lines”--the path traced by a point that travels in a constant direction (due northeast, for example) on a compass.

The United States uses great circles and the Soviets employ rhumb lines. Not surprisingly, each country’s maping technique gives it the largest share of the disputed waters.

State Department officials say there has been no progress toward resolving the dispute. But one official added: “Even if it takes a while to work out a mutually agreeable solution, it is worth the time because if we were shooting at each other up there, it would have serious consequences.”

The focus of the dispute between the State Department and U.S. conservative activists is Wrangel Island, 3,700 square miles of ice-covered rock well above the Arctic Circle in the Chukchi Sea.

By either mapping technique, Wrangel Island falls in Soviet territorial waters. But under international law, it isn’t that simple. And that’s where John Muir and the Red October come in.

The first people known to have landed on the island were members of the crew of the Corwin, a U.S. Navy ship that surveyed the far north in 1881. Muir was aboard the ship, and he wrote in his diary: “We claimed this island for the United States.”

But, according to State Department records, the claim was never formally asserted. Under international law, a government must establish a claim to territory by combining discovery with effective occupation.

The records show that the Russians, starting in 1911, made similar claims. And in 1924 the seven-year-old Soviet government sent the naval ship Red October--the namesake of the fictional Soviet submarine from the best-selling novel “The Hunt for Red October”--to the island with the first colonists. Soviet citizens have lived on the island ever since.

In 1926, the Soviet government asserted sovereignty over the island. State Department records show that the United States, which had no diplomatic relations with Moscow at the time, did not accept the claim but did not protest it either.

U.S. economic interests have claimed the island for as long as the Soviets have. In the early 1920s, the American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, asserting that the island was his property, formed a Canadian company and organized a private expedition to occupy the island. But he was unable to interest either the British or Canadian governments in asserting a claim of sovereignty.

In 1924, Stefansson sold his interest in the island to an American company, Lomen Bros. of Nome, Alaska. An American named Mark J. Sidenberg maintains that he bought the Lomen Bros. interest and claims to own the island. He has accused the State Department of using the border talks as a pretext for giving the island to the Soviets.

David G. Sanders, national field director of the Conservative Caucus, complained that State Department bureaucrats are trying to “circumvent the Constitution” by yielding U.S. interests in the island.

“The thing was first discovered and explored by U.S. citizens,” Sanders said. “The United States has never relinquished its claim.”

A State Department official responded: “It is very difficult to give away something that we have never claimed. Maybe we should have claimed it 100 years ago but we didn’t.”

The Wrangel Island controversy has not even arisen in the talks with the Soviets, State Department officials say. Instead, the prize in the talks is the Navarin Basin in the Bering Sea, a potentially rich offshore oil field.

The Interior Department auctioned oil and gas leases in the basin in 1984, but leases were not awarded on the tracts in the disputed area. Instead, the successful bidders were required to deposit 20% of their bid in an interest-bearing escrow account pending final determination of the status of the territory.

Since 1984, falling oil prices may have made Navarin Basin development unprofitable. And State Department officials say the Soviets lack the technology to develop the oil there.

Probably more important to the Soviets is the impact that a deal with the United States might have on their negotiations with Norway. Application of the mapping technique favored by both Washington and Oslo would place in Norwegian territorial waters the access routes to the Soviet naval station at Murmansk, where most of Moscow’s missile submarines are based.

“The Soviets have pressed very hard for their maritime claims with the Norwegians,” a State Department official said. “In dealing with us, they’ve had one eye on Norway.”