UN General Assembly
1973

25. Ocean politics and economics are essentially new manifestations of power which we have to learn to cope with. They are untrodden territory, where paths can lead to dead ends and dangerous precipices as well as to reassuring pastures and woodlands. There is a Chinese saying that every journey begins with the first step and that the first step determines the destination. So if the first step we take at the forthcoming Third United Nations conference on the Law of the Sea, scheduled to start this year, thrusts us into the jungles of sterile contention and even open conflicts, then, as with the dividing up of the land, the carving up of the seas may well be history written in blood. If the trendy thing is for each coastal State to grab what it can on the basis of the principle of "finders, keepers", then the sea must eventually become the possession of a handful of rich and powerful nations having the technological capabilities and the requisite armoury successfully to assert the dismal proposition that "might is right".