Clinton’s CTB And Other Placebos Won’t Stop, Will Compound The Danger Of Proliferating Weapons Of Mass Destruction

(Washington, D.C.): President Clinton chose the United Nations as the backdrop for consummating one of the most cherished foreign policy goals of the "denuclearizers" that dominate his Administration — the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB). He called it "the longest-sought, hardest fought prize in arms control history." As has so often been true in the checkered history of arms control, however, this "prize" is much less than is being claimed for it.

For example, on 10 September 1996, the director of the Clinton Administration’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, John Hollum, asserted that the UN General Assembly’s approval of the CTB — an action several critical steps removed from its global entry into force — meant that "the nuclear danger has just been reduced." This statement is approximately as misleading and irresponsible as President Clinton’s oft-repeated declaration that "not a single Russian missile is pointed at the children of America." ⁽¹⁾

Indeed, like so many well-intentioned but ultimately defective arms control accords before it, the CTB will probably have the opposite of its desired effect and actually increase the danger arising to the United States from the proliferation of nuclear arms. ⁽²⁾

Why a CTB Won’t Curb Proliferation

Another Unverifiable Treaty: Violations of the Clinton Comprehensive Test Ban cannot be detected or proven with high confidence. What was already a difficult task has been made more so by concessions regarding on-site inspections in the negotiating end-game demanded by China as its price for signing the CTB. Notably, it will take the approval of 30 countries out of the 51-member multilateral "Executive Committee" before an on-site challenge inspection can be conducted. As a practical matter, it is difficult to get thirty countries to agree what day of the week it is. It will be exceedingly problematic to get them to agree to an intrusive inspection over the objections of nations like Russia or China.

The CTB’s unverifiability is not an academic issue. In January of this year, the Department of Defense received indications consistent with an underground nuclear test in Russia — even though Moscow claims that it has been observing a self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing. And the former Defense Nuclear Agency (now called the Defense Special Weapons Agency) has reported that there are several techniques that could be employed to reduce the likelihood that covert nuclear tests will be reliably identified even by in-country seismic monitoring.

What is more, even if the CTB had effective on-site inspection provisions, past experience suggests that the U.S. government would be reluctant to employ them in a manner that would prove other state parties — especially preeminent ones like Russia and China — were in violation. This is an especially unlikely prospect given the enormous political capital expended by the Clinton Administration in securing this accord in the first place.

A CTB Will Not Be Global: The government of India has vowed never to sign the CTB. As drafted, that refusal by a nuclear weapons-capable state will mean that the treaty will not come into force. India — and perhaps other states that choose to follow New Delhi’s example — will be able legally to continue to conduct nuclear tests.

Unless the Senate rejects the CTB, however, the United States would be obliged by international legal practice to take no action that would violate or undercut the treaty’s terms. As a result, the U.S. could find itself permanently enjoined from testing even though others continue to engage in it, legally or illegally.

A CTB Will Not Be an Effective Impediment to Nuclear Proliferation: The CTB simply will not prevent — just as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has not prevented — non-nuclear states who want nuclear weapons from acquiring them, frequent claims by proponents to the contrary notwithstanding. This is because it is no longer necessary for nuclear wannabe states to develop their own weapons; today, they can simply buy fully validated components or, for that matter, complete and previously tested nuclear devices on the international arms market.

It is also the case that, if one is willing to settle for a relatively crude atomic weapon — to say nothing of radiological weapons (i.e., weapons that use conventional explosives rather than fission to scatter lethal radioactive materials) — such devices can be developed without conducting underground nuclear tests. For example, the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki was of a design that had not been subjected to an explosive test beforehand.

Why a CTB Will Compound the Danger of Nuclear Proliferation

If a CTB will not stop other nations from developing or otherwise acquiring nuclear weapons, it will almost certainly impair the U.S. ability to deal with the resulting threat through its own nuclear deterrent capabilities. ⁽³⁾ This result can be predicted since the highly sophisticated weapons that comprise the current U.S. nuclear stockpile were created on the assumption that actual weapons testing would continue to be available. Accordingly, in order for the United States to maintain an effective, safe and reliable — and therefore credible — nuclear deterrent, it is necessary to perform periodic detonations of actual weapons. Successive U.S. presidents, including Jimmy Carter, have declined to complete a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing for this reason, among others.

The reliability of America’s nuclear arsenal will also be degraded by a further immutable fact of life: It takes highly skilled, experienced and dedicated professionals to sustain the U.S. nuclear deterrent force. Today, roughly five years after the United States began a unilateral, uninspected moratorium on nuclear testing, it has lost the services of many of the best and most knowledgeable technicians skilled in using periodic testing to assure the nuclear stockpile worked when it was supposed to — and does not when it is not supposed to. That loss cannot be fully offset by the computer modeling technology in prospect, let alone that in hand. And the CTB will only accelerate the present exodus.

Speaking of JFK: On this point, it was interesting that President Clinton in his speech to the UN today evoked the memory of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, who thirty-three years ago first set the United States on the quest for the CTB Holy Grail. Mr. Clinton neglected to mention, however, President Kennedy’s statement of 2 March 1962 in which he grimly warned against the sort of uninspected moratoriums on nuclear testing that the Clinton CTB has evolved into:

"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 Hidden Cost of the CTB

A further, at present intangible but very real, cost associated with the Clinton Administration’s obsessive pursuit of the Comprehensive Test Ban will become apparent shortly as the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) takes up other arms control initiatives. As the Center for Security Policy noted in a press release on 9 September 1996: ⁽⁴⁾

"The Clinton decision to abrogate the Conference on Disarmament’s consensus rule creates a precedent that is sure to cause the United States great grief in the future. Time and again, hare-brained arms control ideas have been hatched in the CD — ideas that would enjoy overwhelming support in a UN General Assembly invariably hostile to the U.S. and keen to dismantle its military power. Only the American ability to veto or otherwise bottle up such measures in the Conference on Disarmament by refusing to permit a consensus has prevented these measures from entering into force."

Unfortunately, Mr. Clinton used his speech to the UN today to invite several initiatives that will, if this precedent is applied, prove even less verifiable, less global, less effective and more costly to U.S. interests even than the CTB. These include:

• A ban on production of fissile materials: Russia may, as the President declared, have stopped making such materials for nuclear weapons, but they continue to produce large quantities of plutonium and highly enriched uranium as part of their nuclear power program. It is hard to imagine the UNGA majority denying Moscow this obvious circumvention option.

 

• New START agreements, including the destruction of nuclear warheads: This step is not necessarily "irreversible" as Mr. Clinton maintained, and could severely jeopardize U.S. national security secrets. What will happen if the UN General Assembly proves unsatisfied with these "modest" bilateral steps and uses the CTB precedent to ram through a treaty banning nuclear weapons altogether?

 

• Strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by giving the International Atomic Energy Agency a stronger role and sharper tools for conducting worldwide inspections: The IAEA has proven to be a training ground for those determined to cheat on the NPT. It is unclear how giving this organization a "stronger role" and "sharper tools" will alleviate that problem.

 

• Giving the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) "the means to strengthen compliance, including on-site investigations when we believe such weapons may have been used or when suspicious outbreaks of disease occur." The UNGA is likely to see the Chemical Weapons Convention — which the Senate was poised to reject two weeks ago despite President Clinton’s strong support (reiterated today) — as a template for giving the BWC verification and compliance provisions. American biotech firms, among others, are on the record as believing such an arrangement would be unacceptable.

 

• A worldwide ban on the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of antipersonnel land mines. The UN General Assembly will be delighted to adopt a wholly unverifiable ban not only on anti-personnel mines — which continue to be needed to protect U.S. military positions — but also on anti-tank and other forms of mines which the Joint Chiefs of Staff insist must remain in the American arsenal.

 

The Bottom Line

The greatest cost of all, however, arising from the Clinton Administration’s naive effort to use arms control agreements to deal with the threat of proliferating weapons of mass destruction may be the false sense of security induced by these unverifiable and ineffectual agreements. That illusion is sure to be shattered — possibly at great loss of life and national treasure — in the future. It remains to be seen whether, in the event the illusion remains intact until after November 5th, the American people will give a mandate to a President determined to put them in such jeopardy and/or to a Senate disposed to prevent that from happening by rejecting Mr. Clinton’s fatally flawed arms control agenda.

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1. For an excellent rebuttal to Mr. Clinton’s misrepresentations about the missile threat, see the attached article by J. Michael Waller published in today’s Washington Times.

2. See, for example, the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled Vive La France! French Determination to Perform Necessary Nuclear Testing Should Be Wake-Up Call to U.S. (No. 95-D 47, 14 July 1995), and End Game: More Reasons Why the Clinton Administration Should Stop Trying to Conclude a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (No. 96-D 78, 14 August 1996).

3. Importantly, despite its stated commitment to denuclearization, the Clinton Administration insists that it believes the U.S. must rely upon nuclear deterrence to deal with the threat of missile delivered attacks for the foreseeable future.

4. What the World Does Not Need is Any More of Clinton’s Non-Proliferation Non-Achievements (No. 96-P 81).