Fuggedaboutit’: Gen. Shalikashvili’s Paean to C.T.B.T. is Wrong — as well as Dead on Arrival

(Washington, D.C.): Here we go again. The last gasp of the Clinton-Gore Administration apparently will be expended trying to breathe new life into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). That is the reported upshot of a study prepared by General John Shalikashvili, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented to President Clinton today.

In order to validate his pre-ordained recommendation that the CTBT be ratified, Gen. Shalikashvili had to do two things: 1) ignore what is certainly happening with respect to the deterioration in the U.S. deterrent stockpile and 2) bet the farm that what might happen with respect to slowing the inexorable proliferation of nuclear weapons know-how, technology and devices will actually eventuate. Such an approach to security policy can only be described as reckless — and should continue to be rejected by the U.S. Senate.

Don’t Bother Me With the Facts

Gen. Shalikashvili evidently chose to overlook not only classified information that argued against the idea that a permanent, zero-yield test ban was compatible with the national security. He apparently even disregarded information now in the public domain. For example, the New York Times illuminated some of the many, serious concerns about the implications of the CTBT in a lengthy article published on 29 November 2000. Among its highlights were the following:

• Concern is growing: “Since [1992, when the United States began a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing], the Nation has evaluated the thousands of warheads in its aging arsenal in a program called science-based stockpile stewardship, using computer simulations, experiments on bomb components and other methods to assess the condition of the weapons without actually exploding them.

  “Program officials have been confident that the stockpile is safe and secure and that the stewardship program can fully maintain the weapons. Now, however, some of the masters of nuclear weapons design are expressing concern over whether this program is up to the task. Concerns about the program take a variety of forms, including criticisms of its underlying technical rationale and warnings that the program’s base of talented scientists is eroding….”

• Leap of faith: “A stewardship program with no testing is ‘a religious exercise, not science,’ said Dr. Merri Wood, a senior designer of nuclear weaponry at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Wood said that as the weapons aged, it was becoming impossible to say with certainty that the stockpile was entirely functional. ‘I can’t give anybody a safe period,’ she said of the possibility that some weapons could become unreliable. ‘It could happen at anytime…’

• Obsolescing Weapons: “Even with all the [advanced diagnostic tools the SSP is supposed to provide], critics say, crucial questions about the performance of aging bombs must still be answered directly by data from old tests. Because bombs this old were never tested, they say, computer simulations cannot definitively determine the seriousness of new types of changes caused by continued aging….”

  “Assessing the changes can be bewilderingly difficult. The degradation turns symmetrical components shaped like spheres or cylinders into irregular shapes whose properties are a nightmare to model in computer simulations. Inspectors, who typically tear apart one weapon of each design per year and less intrusively check others, find weapons components deteriorating in various ways because the materials age, and because they are exposed to the radioactivity of their own fuel. Even tiny changes in those materials can lead to large changes in bomb performance, weapons designers say.”

Whistling Past the Graveyard

There is, at present, no basis for believing that these and other problems afflicting our aging deterrent — notably the need to introduce new weapons designs to assure its future effectiveness — can be resolved without at least periodic, low-yield nuclear testing. Unfortunately, Gen. Shalikashvili attempts to obscure this reality, reportedly suggesting that the United States can safely forego future testing if only it: increases spending on verification, makes greater efforts to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal and conducts a joint review by the Senate and administration every 10 years to determine whether the treaty is still in the Nation’s best interest.

These recommendations miss a central point: The Senate considered and rejected these and similar placebos as wholly inadequate.¹ As one of the key figures in those deliberations — Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) — observed in a press release after President Clinton received the General’s analysis: “Gen. Shalikashvili’s report simply rehashed the same flawed arguments that failed to persuade the Senate to support the treaty.”

Ditto Gen. Shalikashvili’s shopworn arguments that the CTBT has to be ratified by the Senate in order to slow the pace of global nuclear proliferation. As the Center for Security Policy has documented,² there is no reason to believe that any nation determined to acquire atomic or nuclear weapons capabilities — and there are many — will actually be precluded from doing so because of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), testified before the Foreign Relations Committee on 7 October 1999 in connection with his committee’s conclusions about the CTBT:

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.

The Bottom Line

The conclusion of Senator Kyl’s press release made the relevant point:

[Gen. Shalikashvili’s recommendations] were rejected by a host of former senior officials, including six former Secretaries of Defense….In light of the stated opposition of President-elect George W. Bush, Vice-President-elect Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense-designee Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of Energy-designee Spence Abraham to the treaty, [Sen. Kyl is] confident that the Senate would not revisit the issue….

“In light of the fact that the Senate has already considered and voted to reject this flawed treaty once, and the incoming President and his team have said they oppose the CTBT, I think it’s important that we focus our efforts on devising a new, more effective strategy to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction, rather than continuing to rehash the merits of an old treaty that clearly would do more harm than good.“

¹ See, the Center’s Press Release entitled, Center Releases ‘Truth or Consequences’ Series, Selection of Commentary Providing Senate Key Facts on C.T.B.T. (No. 99-P 114, 12 October 1999).

²See, the Center’s Press Release entitled, Roundtable Summary Shows C.T.B.T. is Defective and ‘Unfixable (No. 00-P 19, 29 Feb 2000).