Senate Majority’s Defeat of C.T.B.T. Represents Triumph of Sound Security Policy Over Placebo Arms Control

Senator Lott Deserves Great Credit for Securing
Vote

(Washington, D.C.): Last night’s action by a majority of the United States Senate to reject
the
fatally flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is its finest hour in a generation. The
Senate has fulfilled its constitutional role as a quality control check-and-balance on the
executive’s treaty-making power. In so doing, it has spared the Nation the obligation to comply
with a permanent, zero-yield ban on nuclear testing that would have done grievous harm to the
U.S. nuclear deterrent. And it did so on the merits of the case, thanks to
Senator Trent Lott’s
leadership, not out of partisan political considerations.

A Defeat for Substantive Reasons, Not Political
Ones

An unprecedented majority of Senators rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban because, when
it
came time to vote, even Senators like Richard Lugar of Indiana, Thad
Cochran of Mississippi,
Ted Stevens of Alaska, Pete Domenici of New Mexico and
Olympia Snowe of Maine —
legislators with unbroken records of bipartisanship in support for arms control agreements and
foreign policy initiatives they deem to be in the national interest — voted to reject this treaty.
It
is contemptible and irresponsible to suggest that these members in particular would so act
out of any motivation other than what they believed to be best for the national security and
the international effort to achieve real constraints upon the proliferation of nuclear
weapons around the world.

Indeed, those who insist that the Senate acted in a partisan fashion display only their
own
ignorance of the substantive nature of the step taken last night and their biases with respect
to both the CTBT itself and the proposition that the Senate is supposed to be more than a
rubber-stamp in the treaty-making process.

This is all the more reprehensible in light of Sen. Lugar’s principled statement:

“I do not believe that the CTBT is of the same caliber as the arms control treaties that
have come before the Senate in recent decades. Its usefulness to the goal of
non-proliferation is highly questionable. Its likely ineffectuality will risk undermining
support and confidence in the concept of multi-lateral arms control. Even as a
symbolic statement of our desire for a safer world, it is problematic because it would
exacerbate risks and uncertainties related to the safety of our nuclear stockpile.”

Credit Where it is Due

These and the other Senators who refused to consent to the CTBT’s ratification did so thanks
primarily to Senator Lott’s patient and sustained efforts to ensure that they were acquainted with
the CTBT’s myriad defects. Briefings arranged for members of the majority by and with
Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Paul Coverdell (R-GA),
involving former Secretary of Defense
and Energy James R. Schlesinger, former Assistant to the Secretary of
Defense for Atomic
Energy Robert Barker and former Assistant Director of the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency Kathleen Bailey were particularly instrumental in providing the
technical, strategic and arms control bases for finding the present test ban to be unacceptable.

Also influential were the arguments advanced in letters to the Senate, congressional
testimony
and other vehicles (notably, editorials and/or op.ed. articles in such newspapers as the Wall
Street
Journal, Washington Times, New York Times and Washington Post), by a
panoply of security
policy practitioners whose service to the country has been characterized by the pursuit of
bipartisan initiatives. These include, in addition to Dr. Schlesinger: former
Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger; former Clinton Directors of Central Intelligence James
Woolsey and John
Deutch and Bush DCI Robert Gates; and former
Secretaries of Defense Melvin Laird,
Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger, Frank Carlucci and Dick
Cheney, former U.N.
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard
Perle, and
nearly a score of retired senior military commanders, including one of the most revered former
chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey. The critique
offered by these
knowledgeable and respected individuals — namely, that the CTBT was unverifiable,
unenforceable and inimical to U.S. national security interests — was dispositive, not
short-term
partisan concerns.

Instrumental to the Majority Leader’s efforts to ensure that the Senate acted on these
concerns by
voting to reject the CTBT were the steadfast, principled and informed contributions to the debate
— and the process by which it was conducted — by, among others: Senate Foreign
Committee
Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Senators Jim Inhofe (R-OK),
Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Paul
Coverdell (R-GA), Phil Gramm (R-TX), Larry Craig
(R-ID), Mitch McConnell (R-KY),
Connie Mack (R-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL),
Bob Smith (I-NH), Tim Hutchinson (R-AR),
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Wayne Allard (R-CO) and
Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

The Good to Come from the CTBT’s Rejection

The Nation owes Senator Lott and his colleagues a particular debt of gratitude for helping set
the
stage for a long-overdue debate about the future course of U.S. nuclear weapons and
arms
control policy. Its principal features should be:

• Encouraging greater realism about the continuing requirement for a safe, reliable
  and
  effective U.S. nuclear deterrent — and the role realistic, periodic underground testing
  plays in assuring that these qualities abide. As President Reagan put it in a 1988 report
  to
  Congress:

“Nuclear testing is indispensable to maintaining the credible nuclear deterrent which has
kept the peace for over 40 years. Thus we do not regard nuclear testing as an evil to be curtailed,
but as a tool to be employed responsibly in pursuit of national security. The U.S. tests neither
more often nor at higher yields than is required for our security. As long as we must depend on
nuclear weapons for our fundamental security, nuclear testing will be necessary.”

• Impressing upon the public that a permanent, zero-yield ban on nuclear testing
  would
  not only harm the U.S. deterrent: it would be ineffectual as a means of controlling
  proliferation. Even Clinton Administration spokesmen acknowledge that it will not
  prevent
  determined nations from acquiring the sorts of “simple” but devastating nuclear devices that
  fully satisfy the needs of the North Koreans, Iranians, Iraqis, etc. to threaten or actually use
  weapons of mass destruction against the United States and/or its allies. In Senator Lugar’s
  words:

“I believe the enforcement mechanisms of the CTBT provide little reason for countries
to
forego nuclear testing. Some of my friends respond to this charge by pointing out that even if the
enforcement provisions of the treaty are ineffective, the treaty will impose new international
norms for behavior. In this case, we have observed that ‘norms’ have not been persuasive for
North Korea, Iraq, Iran, India and Pakistan, the very countries whose actions we seek to
influence through a CTBT.

“If a country breaks the international norm embodied in the CTBT, that country has already
broken the norm associated with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Countries other than the
recognized nuclear powers who attempt to test a weapon must first manufacture or obtain a
weapon, which would constitute a violation of the NPT. I fail to see how an additional
norm
will deter a motivated nation from developing nuclear weapons after violating the
long-standing norm of the NPT.”

• Creating greatly improved opportunities for real “advice” on the part of the
  Senate — in
  particular via its new National Security Working Group (the successor to the Senate’s Arms
  Control Observer Group), chaired by Senator Cochran — during the crafting of negotiating
  positions and the conduct of the negotiations themselves. Such a practice would avoid the
  situation in which the Senate found itself on the CTBT, namely a take-it-or-leave-it position,
  either rubber-stamp or reject the accord outright.

This need not mean, as some of the CTBT’s proponents now contend, an end to arms
control. It may, however, mean an end to bad arms control,
treaties that create false
expectations of security but that cannot deliver, accords that actually harm U.S.
national interests and American capabilities to safeguard them.

At a minimum, a return to the sort of process the Framers of the Constitution
clearly had in mind means that arms control activists, their allies in the executive
branch and their sympathizers in the media should no longer be able to they
claim an exclusive ability to understand and evaluate the merits of proposed or
extant arrangements for constraining weapons of mass destruction and other
military capabilities. As the Senate exercises its responsibilities as a co-equal
branch in the making of international treaties, its real expertise and alternative
visions about the feasibility, utility and desirability of arms control must be
strengthened, acknowledged and respected.

• Affording — via the device of restoring the Senate to its rightful place in
  the treaty-making
  process — the executive branch and its representatives in various arms negotiations
  leverage all-too-lacking in recent years. As Senator Kyl has pointed out in
  the context of
  the CTBT debate, had the Senate’s determination to reject a zero-yield, permanent duration
  test ban been taken into account in 1995, President Clinton should have been able to resist
  pressures from negotiating partners (and some within his own Administration) to abandon
  positions that would have preserved the right to conduct low-yield testing and a finite duration
  to the ban that had been demanded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of
  Defense, the nuclear lab directors and others.

Henceforth, U.S. diplomats will be able credibly to warn their counterparts that the
imposition of terms incompatible with American security will be show-stoppers —
potentially enormously increasing the prospects for sounder, more verifiable and more
valuable arms control agreements in the future.

• Encouraging the pursuit of new and far more promising approaches to dealing
  with the
  real and growing threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction than the
  placebos of phony and counter-productive multilateral arms control. These include: a
  vigorous effort to restore effective multilateral export controls; the rapid deployment of
  anti-missile defenses; improved intelligence and counter-proliferation operations; and collective
  defense measures for our populations.

The Bottom Line

With or without the CTBT, there is going to be more nuclear testing around the world. Even
before the Senate rejected the CTBT, there was evidence of recent low-level Russian and
Chinese nuclear tests. While some may blame these tests on the Senate’s action, the reality is
that rogue states and others are going to make decisions to test nuclear weapons — and, more
importantly, to pursue nuclear weapons programs themselves — on the basis of
national
decisions about the local security situation, not fatuous American efforts to create fraudulent
“norms” of behavior.

Senate Republicans — and, most especially, their leader, Senator Lott — deserve great credit
for
their willingness to risk the charge that nuclear testing elsewhere and other international
developments (for example, as some Democrats implausibly suggested, the recent coup in
Pakistan) are their fault. These charges will be as untenable as they are unfair. By
placing the
national security of the United States ahead of the understandable temptation to accede to the
pressure tactics and wooly-headed nostrums of the anti-nuclear movement, they have created
opportunities for more constructive, realistic and effective means of dealing with the threats the
CTBT would have done nothing to prevent from emerging.

Every American should welcome the national debate on these fundamental choices about
national security policy that the CTBT’s proponents promise to provoke in the hope of
resurrecting their rejected treaty. Let that debate begin!