Pakistan’s Test Offer Further Proof of Irrelevance, Inadvisability of Clinton’s Comprehensive Test Ban

(Washington, D.C.): With today’s five underground detonations, Pakistan has held its own
nuclear “coming out” party. As with India’s equal number of blasts two weeks ago, the Pakistani
nuclear tests did not mark the beginning of that government’s nuclear weapons program. Neither,
had Islamabad continued to refrain from conducting nuclear tests, would their absence have meant
that Pakistan had no nuclear weapons program.

To the contrary, the Indian and Pakistani detonations demonstrate conclusively the
irrelevance of nuclear test bans to the pursuit and successful acquisition of nuclear
weapons. They illustrate, moreover, the futility of President Clinton’s strategy
of curbing the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction via this and similar arms control delusions.

In fact, the only certain effect of this agreement will be to deny the United
States the unique
diagnostic tool that underground testing has supplied over the past thirty years to ensure
the
safety, reliability and effectiveness of America’s nuclear deterrent. Last gasp bids by the Clinton
Administration and its surrogates to press the U.S. Senate to approve ratification of the
Comprehensive Test Ban (CTB) are, in the wake of these revelations, preposterous on their face.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) and
Senate Majority
Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) are right to have indicated that consideration of the CTB is
unlikely
to occur during the present legislative session.⁽¹⁾

Setting the Record Straight on the CTB

Test-ban proponents persist in making four claims to justify U.S. ratification of the CTB.
Unconvincing to begin with, the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan have made them even less
tenable. Consider the following:

• ‘The CTB will constrain nuclear weapons development by non-nuclear weapons
  states.’
  It is now indisputable that so-called “non-nuclear” weapons states can attain nuclear weapons
  without testing them. India is believed to have tested only once — some 24 years ago.
  Its
  nuclear arsenal has clearly grown over the intervening period in the absence of additional tests.
  And Pakistan is not known to have conducted any tests, yet its arsenal has been
  assembled
  assiduously, thanks in no small measure to technical assistance given Islamabad by China.
  Rogue nations like North Korea and Iran surely will be able to obtain nuclear weapons
  capabilities (if they have not already done so) with similar help from Beijing, Russia or other
  quarters.

• ‘United States leadership is essential to bringing hold-out states into the
  treaty.’ If
  nothing else, the recent Indian and Pakistani tests prove that U.S. “leadership” — whether
  expressed in the form of coercive economic threats/bribes or by exemplary self-restraint — is
  absolutely secondary to the country in question’s perceived regional strategic considerations.
  Particularly irrelevant to such calculations is the status of U.S. nuclear testing, even after the
  American test program has been subjected to a six-year, unilateral moratorium.

• ‘The CTB will improve our ability to detect nuclear testing.’

Point
One: Nuclear testing
is not the issue. It is a symptom of a nuclear program and, as discussed above, a not very
reliable one at that.

Point Two: Nuclear testing can be conducted in ways that will be
unverifiable, if not
undetectable. For example, relatively low-yield tests can be concealed by a practice
known as decoupling that can muffle the seismic waves produced by a nuclear test. href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾
Cheating is certain to occur since the CTB purports to ban all nuclear tests — even
those of very low yield that any competent expert will acknowledge cannot be
monitored.

Point Three: The history of arms control is riddled with examples of treaties
where even clear-cut violations are excused or ignored by the other parties. Just
as President Clinton acknowledged recently a tendency on the part of his
Administration to “fudge” the facts when the alternative of telling the truth will
have hard policy implications,⁽³⁾ the Comprehensive Test
Ban will prompt this
government and others to take the most charitable view of ambiguous data, rather
than conclude the treaty has been violated. Were the CTB in force today, it is a
safe bet that — had India and Pakistan not chosen to announce their tests — at
least some of the test ban’s advocates would have challenged any finding that the
seismic data was created by nuclear explosions.⁽⁴⁾

• ‘A test-ban will establish an international norm against nuclear testing.’
  See above.

The Bottom Line

Responding to Pakistan’s tests today, President Clinton declared, “Although Pakistan was not
the
first to test, two wrongs don’t make a right.” Neither will three
wrongs. U.S. interests will not
be served by compounding the potentially dangerous strategic repercussions of Indian and
Pakistani actions by a decision to bind this country to a treaty that will contribute to the
erosion of the American nuclear deterrent.

The appropriate response to the emergence of missile-delivered nuclear capabilities in the
volatile
Asian sub-continent is not to pursue useless and counter-productive arms control agreements but
to deploy global anti-missile defenses. Both Pakistan and India —
and a great many other
countries who might be inclined, all other things being equal, to follow their lead — would be less
tempted to embark upon a destabilizing escalatory spiral if they knew that their offensive missiles
would likely be rendered ineffectual by an American anti-missile system. The fastest, most reliable
and least expensive way to deploy such a defense would be to modify the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air
defense system.⁽⁵⁾ We must get on with doing so at once.

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1. See the following Center output:
India’s Nuclear Tests Show Folly of Clinton’s
C.T.B. (No. 98-D 86, 19 May 1998) and
Chairman Helms Sets the Right Priorities on Pending
Treaties: ABM Amendments, Kyoto Accord to Precede the Test Ban ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-P_13″>No. 98-P 13, 22 January
1998).

2. See Nuclear Spin-Control: Clinton See-No-Evil
Response to Apparent Russian Test Offers
Bitter Foretaste of C.T.B. (No. 97-D 156, 20
October 1997).

3. See Clinton Legacy Watch # 23: Confession of a
Politicizer (No. 98-D 72, 28 April 1998).

4. See Wake-Up Call From Novaya Zemlya:
Zero-Yield Nuclear Test-Ban is Unverifiable,
Russians Will Cheat, U.S. Will Suffer (No. 97-D
119, 28 August 1997).

5. See Senate Should Vote to Defend America ‘As
Soon As Technologically Possible’ (No. 98-D 79, 6
May 1998).