Gerard Barron

And so they said, we need to... There's a lot of polymetallic nodules around them.

And so we need...

to use the recovery of these polymetallic nodules as the cover story to go and recover the sunken Russian submarine.

So they thought, well, they're not gonna believe that we, the government, are gonna be involved, so who can we get to front it?

Howard Hughes, because everyone thought, he's a bit crazy, he'll be up for this.

And so they reached out to Howard Hughes and he said, yeah, of course, no problem.

And so the CIA funded it all.

And there were other companies involved.

And the Glomar Explorer became the first deep sea exploration vessel and mining vessel.

And it...

That attracted other people into the industry because, of course, no one else knew about this.

And so then you had other consortia formed, Shell and BP and Mitsubishi from Japan and many other corporations became involved.

And this whole industry was moving forward.

But then the United Nations decided they wanted to get involved as well.

Because they were like, well, who owns the ocean?

We should all agree this set of rules.

We should share these resources in a more equitable manner.

And so 169 countries now signed onto this treaty called UNCLOS.

But what it meant was America had this leading position when it comes to polymetallic nodules and ocean metals.

But then they decided to step back and see where this international consortia went.