Six Secretaries of Defense Urge Defeat of C.T.B.T.

(Washington, D.C.): In an unprecedented public statement of opposition to a signed
arms
control agreement, six former Secretaries of Defense — one of whom, Dr. James R. Schlesinger
was also (among other things) a Secretary of Energy in the Carter Administration — have written
the Republican and Democratic leaders of the U.S. Senate urging the defeat of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

This authoritative description of the CTBT’s defects and the deleterious repercussions
its
ratification would have for America’s nuclear deterrent should be required reading for every
Senator and every other participant in what is shaping up to be a momentous debate over the
Nation’s future security posture. In particular, this letter — which clearly benefits from Dr.
Schlesinger’s vast experience as a former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, former
Director of Central Intelligence as well as a former Secretary of Defense and Energy (in the
latter capacity, he was instrumental in dissuading President Carter from pursuing the sort of
permanent, zero-yield CTBT that the incumbent President hopes to ratify) — does much to rebut
the putative “military” arguments being made on behalf of this accord.

October 6, 1999

Dear Senators Lott and Daschle:

As the Senate weighs whether to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), we
believe Senators will be obliged to focus on one dominant, inescapable result were it to be
ratified: over the decades ahead, confidence in the reliability of our nuclear weapons stockpile
would inevitably decline, thereby reducing the credibility of America’s nuclear deterrent. Unlike
previous efforts at a CTBT, this Treaty is intended to be of unlimited duration, and though
“nuclear weapon test explosion” is undefined in the Treaty, by America’s unilateral declaration
the accord is “zero-yield,” meaning that all nuclear tests, even of the lowest yield, are
permanently prohibited.

The nuclear weapons in our nation’s arsenal are sophisticated devices, whose thousands of
components must function together with split-second timing and scant margin for error. A
nuclear weapon contains radioactive material, which in itself decays, and also changes the
properties of other materials within the weapon. Over time, the components of our weapons
corrode and deteriorate, and we lack experience predicting the effects of such aging on the safety
and reliability of the weapons. The shelf life of U.S. nuclear weapons was expected to be some
20 years. In the past, the constant process of replacement and testing of new designs have some
assurance that weapons in the arsenal would be both new and reliable. But under the CTBT, we
would be vulnerable to the effects of aging because we could not test “fixes” of problems with
existing warheads.

Remanufacturing components of existing weapons that have deteriorated also poses
significant
problems. Manufacturers go out of business, materials and production processes change, certain
chemicals previously used in production are now forbidden under new environmental
regulations, and so on. It is certainty that new processes and materials–untested–will be used.
Even more important, ultimately the nuclear “pits” will need to be replaced–and we will not be
able to test those replacements. The upshot is that new defects may be introduced into the
stockpile through remanufacture, and without testing we can never be ceratin that these
replacement components will work as their predecessors did.

Another implication of a CTBT of unlimited duration is that over time we would gradually
lose
our pool of knowledgeable people with experience in nuclear weapons design and testing.
Consider what would occur if the United States halted nuclear testing for 30 years. We would
then be dependent on the judgement of personnel with no personal experience either in designing
or testing nuclear weapons. In place of a learning curve, we would experience an extended
unlearning curve.

Furthermore, major gaps exist in our scientific understanding of nuclear explosives. As
President Bush noted in a report to Congress in January 1993, “Of all U.S. nuclear weapons
designs fielded since 1958, approximately one-third have required nuclear testing to resolve
problems arising after deployment.” We were discovering defects in our arsenal up until the
moment when the current moratorium on U.S. testing was imposed in 1992. While we have
uncovered similar defects since 1992, which in the past would gave let to testing, in the absence
of testing, we are not able to test whether the “fixes” indeed work.

Indeed, the history of maintaining complex military hardware without testing demonstrates
the
pitfalls of such an approach. Prior to World War II, the Navy’s torpedoes had not been
adequately tested because of insufficient funds. It took nearly two years of war before we fully
solved the problems that caused our torpedoes to routinely pass harmlessly under the target or to
fail to explode on contact. For example, at the Battle of Midway, the U.S. launched 47 torpedo
aircraft, without damaging a single Japanese ship. If not for our dive bombers, the U.S. would
have lost the crucial naval battle of the Pacific war.

The Department of Energy has structured a program of experiments and computer
simulations
called the Stockpile Stewardship Program, that it hopes will allow our weapons to be maintained
without testing. This program, which will not be mature for at least 10 years, will improve our
scientific understanding of nuclear weapons and would likely mitigate the decline in our
confidence in the safety and reliability of our arsenal. We will never know whether we should
trust Stockpile Stewardship if we cannot conduct nuclear tests to calibrate the unproven new
techniques. Mitigation is, of course, not the same as prevention. Over the decades, the erosion
of confidence inevitably would be substantial.

The decline in confidence in our nuclear deterrent is particularly troublesome in light of the
unique geopolitical role of the United States. The U.S. has a far-reaching foreign policy agenda
and our forces are stationed around the globe. In addition, we have pledged to hold a nuclear
umbrella over our NATO allies and Japan. Though we have abandoned chemical and biological
weapons, we have threatened to retaliate with nuclear weapons to such an attack. In the Gulf
War, such a threat was apparently sufficient to deter Iraq from using chemical weapons against
American troops.

We also do not believe the CTBT will do much to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
The
motivation of rogue nations like North Korea and Iraq to acquire nuclear weapons will not be
affected by whether the U.S. tests. Similarly, the possession of nuclear weapons by nations like
India, Pakistan, and Israel depends on the security environment in their region not by whether or
not the U.S. tests. If confidence in the U.S. nuclear deterrent were to decline, countries that have
relied on our protection could well fell compelled to seek nuclear capabilities of their own. Thus,
ironically, the CTBT might cause additional nations to seek nuclear weapons.

Finally, it is impossible to verify a ban that extends to very low yields. The likelihood of
cheating is high. “Trust but verify” should remain our guide. Tests with yields below 1 kiloton
can both go undetected and be militarily useful to the testing state. Furthermore, a significantly
larger explosion can go undetected–or mistaken for a conventional explosion used for mining or
an earthquake–if the test if “decoupled.” Decoupling involves conducting the test in a large
underground cavity and has been shown to dampen an explosion’s seismic signature by a factor
of up to 70. The U.S. demonstrated this capability in 1966 in two tests conducted in salt domes
at Chilton, Mississippi.

We believe that these considerations render a permanent, zero-yield Comprehensive Test
Ban
Treaty incompatible with the Nation’s international commitments and vital security interests and
believe it does not deserve the Senate’s advice and consent. Accordingly, we respectfully urge
you and your colleagues to preserve the right of this nation to conduct nuclear tests necessary to
the future of our nuclear deterrent by rejecting approval of the present CTBT.

Respectfully,

James R. Schlesinger

Richard B. Cheney

Frank C. Carlucci

Caspar W. Weinberger

Donald H. Rumsfeld

Melvin R. Laird