Reality Check

Wall Street Journal, 01June 1998

Now that Pakistan has joined India in exploding nuclear devices, the question of the hour
becomes: Is the world better off if these countries have nuclear weapons in public or in secret?

Obviously both have had the weapons in secret all along, and perhaps not going public with
actual
tests slowed the momentum of nuclear development elsewhere. On the other hand, who was
fooled by the secrecy: Iran? Iraq? North Korea? With both sides showing their cards, is another
India-Pakistan war really more likely, or will deterrence prevail in the subcontinent as it did in the
Cold War? Arguable questions, of course, but the lack of an obvious answer suggests the
world-wide reaction to the tests carries more than a tinge of hysteria.

Flopping around in search of a posture if not a policy, the Clinton Administration has been
imploring the miscreant nations to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a cry of course
echoed by the U.N. Security Council. Someone ought to notice that the tests torched that scrap of
paper. If Pakistan could successfully develop nuclear weapons without actual tests, as clearly it
did, what would prevent any of the treaty’s signatories from doing the same? What’s more, the
seismic monitors that are supposed to verify the CTBT have produced mostly confusion about
how many tests there were, and how powerful they were.

There is also the detail that the treaty has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate. It faces
opposition
there because military experts have long argued that the U.S. needs to conduct periodic
underground tests to assure the reliability of its arsenal. As the CTBT was in the final stages of
negotiation in 1996, the Senate refused further authority for U.S. tests by a 53-45 vote, well short
of the two-thirds necessary to confirm a treaty.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jesse Helms announced in January that he would hold no
hearings on the CTBT until after disposition of the Kyoto global warming treaty and amendments
to the 1972 anti-missile treaty. While the Administration has signed these two agreements, it has
not submitted them for likely Senate rejection. Rightly viewing this as an affront to the Senate’s
powers to advise and consent, Chairman Helms has declared the CTBT hostage. Its fate seems all
the more dubious after the new tests.

As it happens, legislation limiting U.S. testing would also seem to have been abrogated by the
Indian and Pakistani tests. The 1992 Exon-Hatfield Amendment, which banned U.S. tests after
1996, allows an exception if another state conducts nuclear tests. Of course, President Clinton,
who threatened a veto during Senate debate over extension of the 1996 deadline, is not likely to
order new tests even though the exception seems to give him power to do so.

The tests also call into question another of the Clinton Administration’s diplomatic triumphs,
the
plan to stop the North Korean nuclear program by bribing Pyongyang with fuel oil shipments and
then with an American-designed nuclear reactor, considered less dangerous than one North Korea
agreed to close. North Korean diplomats have complained that the U.S. is behind in its oil
deliveries, and threatened to reopen their reactor. U.S. experts who say this is unlikely also failed
to anticipate the Indian tests. By the way, we hear, U.S. experts “monitoring” the agreement have
done North Korea the favor of purifying the plutonium extracted from their closed reactor.

The Indian and Pakistani tests, in short, exploded a lot of wishful thinking. Unilateral restraint
by
the U.S. and the pressure of “world opinion” did not work. The two nations most likely to
develop nuclear weapons went right ahead and did it. Whatever dangers the new tests may
impend, they also provide a reality check on a lot of heady notions about arms control.