C.T.B.T. Truth or Consequences #3: President Bush Did Not ‘Impose’ a Test Moratorium — It Was Imposed on Him

(Washington, D.C.): One of the more pernicious misstatements being served up by Clinton
Administration officials desperately trying to induce Republican Senators to agree to the
ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is to the effect that former President
George Bush “imposed a moratorium” on U.S. nuclear testing before leaving office. The most
recent such misrepresentation was made on ABC News’ “This Week” program on Sunday by
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. By so doing, they transparently hope to lend an otherwise
almost wholly lacking patina of bipartisanship to this accord.

The fact is that President Bush was euchred on the eve of the 1992 election into accepting
legislative restrictions on nuclear testing that he vehemently opposed. This point was made clear
in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week by Dr. Robert
Barker, a
nuclear weapon designer who served as the Pentagon’s top nuclear weapons expert during the
Reagan and Bush Administrations:

There should be no doubt whatsoever that President Bush and the entire
administration
that stood behind him believed that nuclear testing was necessary for the maintenance of a
safe and reliable stockpile. I don’t believe the technical facts have changed since 1993.
I
believe we are faced with a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty not because the technical facts have
changed but because some political issues are different now than were true in 1993.

President Bush’s Legacy

President Bush’s attitude towards nuclear testing is made express in an unclassified passage
from
a classified report he submitted to the Congress on his Administration’s last full day in office.
This report was written to explain why the Bush Administration found a statute mandating an
end to all U.S. nuclear testing, following a final series of underground tests, to be incompatible
with the national security. It read, in part:

“…The Administration has concluded that it is not possible to develop a test program within
the
constraints of Public Law 102-377 that would be fiscally, militarily and technically responsible.
The requirement to maintain and improve the safety of U.S. forces necessitates
continued
nuclear testing for those purposes, albeit at a modest level, for the foreseeable future.
The
Administration strongly urges the Congress to modify this legislation urgently, in order to permit
the minimum number and kind of underground nuclear tests that the United States requires —
regardless of the action of other states — to retain safe and reliable, although dramatically
reduced, nuclear deterrent forces.”

The reasons for President Bush’s adamant position on the need to continue
nuclear testing in
order to assure the safety and reliability of the U.S. deterrent is not hard to comprehend in light
of the experience described by Dr. Barker in his testimony on 7 October:

“During my six years in the Pentagon, from 1986 to 1992, the people in the nuclear weapons
laboratories were even more experienced [than they are today since they] were doing
nuclear
testing. Well, every day of any year I could go to them and they would tell me my stockpile was
safe, my stockpile was reliable — I could count on their judgment.

“Five times during that six-year period I was faced with catastrophic failures in the
stockpile. The Department of Energy came to me on five occasions, and I found
myself going to
Secretaries Weinberger or Carlucci or Cheney, and telling them that a weapon in the
inventory
could not be trusted to do its job. And until we did further tests those weapons were
basically
non-operational, and we were faced with trying to deal with the situation of instantaneously
having a weapons system not available to us….In every case where a change had to be made in
order to fix the problem, a nuclear test was required to be sure that the fix worked.”

President Clinton’s Legacy

Dr. Barker also pointed out to the Senate how the Clinton Administration’s ideological
attachment to the idea of banning all nuclear testing — without regard to the implications for the
safety and reliability of the stockpile — had a singularly perverse effect:

“It’s one of the great ironies that there was a thing in existence back in 1993 called a
test ban
readiness program, which called for a significant number of tests each year for a decade in
order to prove whether or not a scheme of calculation and non-nuclear simulation
would
provide a reliable replacement for nuclear testing….That is the reliable, scientific even
business approach. You do not change your calibration tool without comparing the results.

“No business would change its accounting system without verifying that the new system
gave the
same results of the new. No scientist would change the calibration tool in his laboratory without
validating that the new tool gave the same result as the old. And in 1993 we were embarked
upon a process of developing a set of tools that we could assess whether or not they would prove
to be a reliable replacement for nuclear testing.

“The cessation of nuclear testing cut that whole thing off, and instead we
jumped into the
replacement and have denied ourselves the ability to ever calibrate it if we ratify this
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”

The Bottom Line

No President since John F. Kennedy has voluntarily imposed the kind of unilateral
moratorium
on nuclear testing upon which Bill Clinton has insisted over the past seven years — and for good
reason. And President Kennedy declared when he ended the three year testing moratorium he
had adopted:

“We know enough now about broken negotiations, secret preparations and the advantages
gained
from a long test series never to offer again an uninspected moratorium. Some may urge us
to try
it again, keeping our preparations to test in a constant state of readiness. But in
actual practice,
particularly in a society of free choice, we cannot keep top flight scientists concentrating on
the preparation of an experiment which may or may not take place on an uncertain date in
the undefined future.

“Nor can large technical laboratories be kept fully alert on a stand-by basis waiting for some
other nation to break an agreement. This is not merely difficult or inconvenient — we
have
explored this alternative thoroughly and found it impossible of execution.”

The fact is that President George Bush, many of those who served in senior ranks of his
administration — notably, his Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, his National Security Advisor
Brent Scowcroft and his Secretary of Energy James Watkins have all expressed their opposition
to this treaty — and his son, George W. Bush, have formally counseled the Senate against
permanent unilateral and/or multilateral bans on nuclear testing. This counsel should be heeded
— not misrepresented or ignored.