Stormy Seas: Anglo-American Negotiations on Ocean Surveillance

On April 14, 1986, 18 US F-111 fighter-bombers passed unhindered over the Strait of Gibraltar on a mission intended to assassinate Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. The mission failed, and Gaddafi would not be ousted from power until the Arab Spring and subsequent uprising of 2011. Yet the episode was important for another reason: This was the first time that the US administration invoked the UN International Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) to assert free passage through sea straits for ships and aircraft in order to launch an air attack without violating the airspace of neighboring European countries. This was a decisive move, especially because the Strait of Gibraltar has long been the site of various tensions, even between “special” allies. Gibraltar has been a British bastion for centuries, but the Spanish government has always contested the right of free passage through the Strait, and the United States and France have also vied for control of these strategically vital waters

Ocean Science and the British Cold War State

This book focuses on the activities of the scientific staff of the British National Institute of Oceanography during the Cold War. Revealing how issues such as intelligence gathering, environmental surveillance, the identification of ‘enemy science’, along with administrative practice informed and influenced the Institute’s Cold War program. In turn, this program helped shape decisions taken by Government, military and the civil service towards science in post-war Britain. This was not simply a case of government ministers choosing to patronize particular scientists, but a relationship between politics and science that profoundly impacted on the future of ocean science in Britain