A Test Ban That Disarms Us

When it comes to nuclear testing, nations will act in their perceived self-interest.

By Charles Krauthammer

Some debates just never go away. The Clinton administration is back again pressing
Congress
for passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This is part of a final-legacy push
that includes a Middle East peace for just-in-time delivery by September 2000.

The argument for the test ban is that it will prevent nuclear proliferation. If countries cannot
test
nukes, they will not build them because they won’t know if they work. Ratifying the CTBT is
supposed to close the testing option for would-be nuclear powers.

We sign. They desist. How exactly does this work?

As a Washington Post editorial explains, one of the ways to “induce would-be proliferators
to get
off the nuclear track” is “if the nuclear powers showed themselves ready to accept some
increasing part of the discipline they are calling on non-nuclear others to accept.” The power of
example of the greatest nuclear country is expected to induce other countries to follow suit.

History has not been kind to this argument. The most dramatic counterexamples, of course,
are
rogue states such as North Korea, Iraq and Iran. They don’t sign treaties and, even when they do,
they set out to break them clandestinely from the first day. Moral suasion does not sway them.

More interesting is the case of friendly countries such as India and Pakistan. They are exactly
the
kind of countries whose nuclear ambitions the American example of restraint is supposed to
mollify.

Well, then. The United States has not exploded a nuclear bomb either above or below ground
since 1992. In 1993, President Clinton made it official by declaring a total moratorium on U.S.
testing. Then last year, India and Pakistan went ahead and exploded a series of nuclear bombs.
So much for moral suasion. Why did they do it? Because of this obvious, if inconvenient, truth:
Nuclear weapons are the supreme military asset. Not that they necessarily will be used in
warfare. But their very possession transforms the geopolitical status of the possessor. The
possessor acquires not just aggressive power but, even more important, a deterrent capacity as
well.

Ask yourself: Would we have launched the Persian Gulf War if Iraq had been bristling with
nukes?

This truth is easy for Americans to forget because we have so much conventional strength
that
our nuclear forces appear superfluous, even vestigial. Lesser countries, however, recognize the
political and diplomatic power conveyed by nuclear weapons.

They want the nuclear option. For good reason. And they will not forgo it because they are
moved by the moral example of the United States. Nations follow their interests, not norms.

Okay, say the test ban advocates. If not swayed by American example, they will be swayed
by
the penalties for breaking an international norm.

What penalties? China exploded test after test until it had satisfied itself that its arsenal was
in
good shape, then quit in 1996. India and Pakistan broke both the norm on nuclear testing and
nonproliferation. North Korea openly flouted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Were any of these countries sanctioned? North Korea was actually rewarded with enormous
diplomatic and financial inducements — including billions of dollars in fuel and food aid — to act
nice. India and Pakistan got slapped on the wrist for a couple of months.

That’s it. Why? Because these countries are either too important (India) or too scary (North
Korea). Despite our pretensions, for America too, interests trump norms.

Whether the United States signs a ban on nuclear testing will not affect the course of
proliferation. But it will affect the nuclear status of the United States.

In the absence of testing, the American nuclear arsenal, the most sophisticated on the globe
and
thus the most in need of testing to ensure its safety and reliability, will degrade over time. As its
reliability declines, it becomes unusable. For the United States, the unintended effect of a test ban
is gradual disarmament.

Well, maybe not so unintended. For the more extreme advocates of the test ban,
nonproliferation
is the ostensible argument, but disarmament is the real objective. The Ban the Bomb and Nuclear
Freeze movements have been discredited by history, but their adherents have found a back door.
A nuclear test ban is that door. For them, the test ban is part of a larger movement: the war
against weapons. It finds expression in such touching and useless exercises as the land mine
convention, the biological weapons convention, etc. The test ban, unfortunately, is more than
touching and useless. It may actually work — to disarm not the North Koreas of the world but the
United States.