C.T.B.T. Truth or Consequences #2: This Treaty is Unverifiable — It May Make Monitoring Others’ Nuke Programs More Difficult

(Washington, D.C.): In a daily drumbeat of remarks aimed at selling the Comprehensive
Test
Ban Treaty (CTBT) to an unreceptive Senate, President Clinton has repeatedly made the claim
that this treaty is “effectively verifiable.” While he and his subordinates acknowledge that all
testing will not actually be detectable, they insist that any that would undermine our nuclear
deterrent would be picked up by U.S. and/or international monitoring systems — the latter, the
CTBT’s proponents assert, representing a significant augmentation of the former. For example,
Mr. Clinton recently declared: “The treaty will also strengthen our ability to monitor if other
countries are engaged in suspicious activities through global chains of sensors and on-site
inspections, both of which the treaty provides for.”

The Truth

Fortunately, authoritative testimony in the Senate Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign
Relations Committees last week provided needed rebuttals to such claims. While the most
sensitive of that testimony was taken by the Intelligence Committee in closed session, an
invaluable summary was provided by the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), in an appearance before the Foreign
Relations
Committee on 7 October. Highlights of Chairman Shelby’s authoritative statement include the
following:

• “It’s my considered judgment, as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, based on a
  review
  of the intelligence analysis and on testimony this week from the intelligence community’s
  senior arms control analyst, that it’s impossible to monitor compliance with
  this treaty with
  the confidence that the Senate should demand before providing its advice and consent
  for ratification.

“I’m not confident that we can now or can in the foreseeable future detect any and all
nuclear explosions prohibited under the treaty. While I have a greater degree of confidence in
our ability to monitor higher-yield explosions in known test sites, I have markedly less
confidence in our capabilities to monitor lower-yield and/or evasively conducted tests,
including tests that may enable states to develop new nuclear weapons or improve existing
weapons.

• “At this point, I should point out too that while the proponents of the treaty have argued
  that it
  will prevent nuclear proliferation, the fact is that some of the countries of most concern
  to
  us — North Korea, Iran and Iraq — can develop and deploy nuclear weapons without any
  nuclear tests whatsoever.

“With respect to monitoring, in July of ’97, the intelligence community issued a national
intelligence estimate entitled: ‘Monitoring the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Over the Next 10
Years.’ …The NIE was not encouraging about our ability to monitor compliance with the treaty
or about the likely utility of the treaty in preventing countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq
from developing and fielding nuclear weapons. The NIE identified numerous
challenges,
difficulties and credible evasion scenarios that affect the intelligence community’s
confidence in its ability to monitor compliance.

• “Because the details are classified and because of the inherent difficulty of summarizing a
  very highly technical analysis covering a number of different countries and a multitude of
  variables, I recommend that members, including the members of this committee, review this
  document with the following caution: Based on testimony before the committee this
  week,
  I believe that newly acquired information requires reevaluation of the 1997 estimate’s
  assumptions and underlying analysis on certain key issues. The revised assumptions
  and analysis appear certain to lead to even more pessimistic
  conclusions.”

• “Many proponents of the treaty place their faith, in monitoring aids provided under the
  treaty
  such as the International Monitoring System — IMS — a multinational seismic detection
  system, and the CTBT’s On-Site Inspection regime — OSI. Based on a review of the
  structure, likely capabilities and procedures of these international mechanisms, neither of
  which will be ready to function for a number of years, and based on the intelligence
  community’s own analysis and statements, I’m concerned that these organizations will
  be
  of at best limited, if not marginal margin.

“I believe this IMS will be technically inadequate. For example, it
was not designed to
detect evasively conducted tests which, if you are Iraq or North Korea, are precisely the kind
you’re going to conduct. It was designed, as you know with diplomatic sensitivities rather
than
effective monitoring in mind. And it will be eight to 10 years before the system is
complete.

“Because of these factors and for other technical reasons, I’m afraid that the IMS is
more likely
to muddy the waters by injecting questionable data into what will inevitably be
highly
charged political debate over possible non-compliance. As a result, the value of more
accurate, independently obtained U.S. information will be undermined, making it more difficult
for the U.S. to make its case for noncompliance if it were to become necessary.

• “And with respect to on-site inspection, I believe that the on-site inspection regime
  invites
  delay and confusion. For example, while U.S. negotiators originally sought an
  automatic
  green light for on-site inspections as a result of the opposition of the People’s Republic of
  China, now, the regime that was adopted allows inspections only with the approval of 30 of
  the 51 countries on the executive committee. Members of the Committee will appreciate the
  difficulty of rounding up the votes for such a supermajority.

“I am also deeply troubled by the fact that the inspected party has a veto, a veto over
including U.S. inspectors on an inspection team and the right of the inspected party to declare
areas up to 50 kilometers off limits to inspection. I understand these provisions mirror
limitations sought by Saddam Hussein on the UNSCOM inspectors, which leads me to
believe that some of the OSI standards could be what’s cut out for Iraq. As a result of these and
other hurdles even if inspectors do eventually get near the scene of a suspicious event,
the
evidence, which is highly perishable, may well have vanished.”

In addition to Sen. Shelby’s summary of the information available to the Intelligence
Committee,
Dr. Kathleen Bailey — a highly respected former Associate Director
of the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency — added the following points in her testimony before the Senate
Armed
Services Committee:

“The international monitoring system of the CTBT is designed or is capable of detecting
greater
than one kiloton of nuclear yield for a non-evasively conducted test. So, if Russia or
someone
else decides to conduct a test evasively, the IMS system will probably not be able to detect
it.

“This is because there are various techniques that can be used to basically mask the fact that
you
tested. One of the most widely known is called decoupling, and I would here rely on an
unclassified paper I heard a CIA official present last year in which he described the fact that
a
nation could put a nuclear device in a cavity, detonate it, and essentially the space around it
in this cavity would muffle or mitigate the sound, so that the seismic signal is reduced by as
much as a factor of 70. This means that a one-kiloton explosion could look like only
14 tons.
So it would be well below the threshold of the international monitoring system.”

The Bottom Line

The fact is that militarily significant covert nuclear testing can — and almost certainly
will — be
conducted at low-yields or in other ways aimed at masking the force of an explosion.
Unfortunately, the history of arms control is riddled with examples of treaties where even
clear-cut violations are excused or ignored by the other parties. Just as President
Clinton has
acknowledged a tendency on the part of his Administration to “fudge” the facts when the
alternative of telling the truth will have hard policy implications, the Comprehensive Test Ban
will prompt this government and others to take the most charitable view of ambiguous data,
rather than conclude the treaty has been violated.

If anything, as Sen. Shelby has noted, the very fact that a treaty is at stake will probably
make it
more likely, not less, that U.S. intelligence will be discouraged from ascertaining the
true status
of potentially hostile powers’ nuclear weapons programs and behavior that may contravene the
CTBT and/or the “international norm” it is supposed to establish and promote. Far from
contributing to American security, the Comprehensive Test Ban would — in this fashion, among
others — degrade that security.