Vote — and Defeat — the C.T.B.T. Today

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate is, at present, scheduled to vote on the fatally flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) late this afternoon. Should that vote occur as required under a Unanimous Consent agreement entered into almost two weeks ago, it is expected to resulting in the CTBT’s rejection by perhaps as many as 45 or more Senators (well above the one-third-plus-one or 34 votes required under the Constitution to defeat a treaty).

For that not to happen, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) will have to decide to support a motion to defer further consideration of the treaty. Fortunately, for the national security and interest, Senator Lott has publicly opposed this treaty on the grounds that "It is simply not possible to be simultaneously for nuclear deterrence and for this Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The two positions are mutually exclusive." Additional remarks from his address to the Senate last Friday on this subject are attached. ¹ They can be paraphrased as follows:

• Periodic, underground nuclear testing — at the very least at low-yield levels — is essential to the maintenance of a safe, reliable and effective nuclear deterrent. This has been the United States’ historical experience and there is no other technique available that provides anything like the confidence required, nor will there be for at least ten years into the future. So long as we need to rely upon nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor of our security, we have no choice but to tests them in a responsible, safe and realistic manner.

• The idea of banning nuclear testing is a longstanding objective of the radical anti-nuclear movement; it will lead inexorably to unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament. Without realistic explosive testing, it will be impossible either to modernize our deterrent or refurbish the obsolescing weapons that currently comprise the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Over time, these realities will make it politically, if not technically, impossible to field an American deterrent force.

• The CTBT will not prevent a single country determined secretly to acquire nuclear weapons — or to improve them — from doing so. The zero-yield test ban before the Senate is unverifiable; well-understood techniques can be exploited for conducting covert tests that are militarily significant without fear of getting caught — even if the Treaty’s seismic monitoring and on-site inspection provisions come into play. Matters are made worse by the fact that the CTBT lacks a definition of what constitutes prohibited "nuclear test explosions" — guaranteeing that other nations will exploit this ambiguity to conduct tests the United States considers to be prohibited.

Don’t Delay the Vote

President Clinton and his allies, having insisted for months on the Senate’s immediate consideration of this accord in time for a CTBT review conference held last week in Vienna, were initially surprised, then unanimously agreed to a fixed period for debate and a near-term vote. In other words, when they thought they had (or could get) the necessary votes, the CTBT’s proponents were quite content with this arrangement. Now that the full magnitude of their impending defeat is clear, they are frantically trying to intimidate, coerce and/or plead with Senator Lott to grant them a stay-of-execution.

The specifics of this arrangement are not important; the bottom line will be the same: No matter what the Treaty’s advocates promise to do to secure the Majority Leader’s acquiescence, once the vote is postponed today, they will work tirelessly to change votes or, if necessary, the control of the Senate to get the CTBT ratified as soon as possible.

Quite apart from the political repercussions, putting off consideration of the CTBT will pose a dramatic threat to U.S. security for, among others, the following reasons:

• An astounding array of former top security policy practitioners opposes this Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. On the grounds that it is unverifiable, unenforceable and inimical to the maintenance of safe and reliable nuclear deterrent it is strenuously opposed by no fewer than six former Secretaries of Defense, four former National Security Advisors to the President, four former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency (including two appointed by President Clinton), three former Secretaries of Energy, three former directors of the nuclear laboratories and over twenty former senior generals and admirals.

• For these reasons, even Senators with an unbroken record of support for arms control agreements like Senators Richard Lugar of Indiana, Olympia Snow of Maine and Ted Stevens of Alaska have declared this CTBT to be fatally flawed and announced their intention to reject the Treaty if the vote is held at this juncture.

• Should the Treaty not be formally rejected by the Senate, the best that can be hoped for is that a treaty judged by nearly every Republican Senator to be inconsistent with U.S. security will continue to bind the United States for the foreseeable future — in Sen. Lott’s words, "preventing the United States from making our weapons safer and from adapting our nuclear stockpile to new threats." Under Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties:

"A State is obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of a treaty when…it has signed the treaty or has exchanged instruments constituting the treaty subject to ratification, acceptance of approval, until it shall have made its intention clear not to become a party to the treaty…."

 

Under these circumstances, a vote to defer further Senate action on the CTBT would amount to the worst of both worlds: Open-ended adherence to the Treaty’s prohibition on all nuclear tests — without giving Senators the opportunity to show, by their votes, the unacceptability of such a ban.

The Bottom Line

President Clinton and his allies in the anti-nuclear movement have made clear their intention to use the CTBT issue against Republicans in the course of the 2000 election cycle. Already emotionally charged TV ads — showing nuclear blasts destroying children — are on the air in selected markets like Michigan, targeted at Republican Senator Spence Abraham.

CTBT opponents will likely face this assault whether they vote down the treaty now or leave it pending. They will be far better positioned to take their case to the American people, however, if a near-majority of the Senate votes to defeat the accord as scheduled today.

¹For additional analysis of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’s fatal flaws, see the Center’s CTBT Truth or Consequences Series released on 11 October. These materials may be obtained via the Center for Security Policy website (www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org) or by contacting the Center.