Non-Starter: Clinton’s Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is Unworthy of Senate’s Time — Let Alone Its Consent

(Washington, D.C.): It must be asked: Why was President Clinton’s Rose Garden statement
yesterday — in which he urged Senate hearings this fall and final action on the 1996
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — all but ignored today by the Nation’s leading newspapers?

Perhaps the deafening silence in the press is a function of the transparent dishonesty of some
of
his claims on behalf of the Treaty — and about what would happen if the Senate did not approve
its ratification. Perhaps it was a reflection of the evident irrelevance of this multi-lateral arms
control accord to the ongoing spread of nuclear weapons technology.

Whatever the reason, the White House press corps’ failure to publicize these
presidential
remarks does not bode well for the power-play that anti-nuclear activists within and
outside the Clinton-Gore Administration hope to unleash in the next few weeks in a bid to
secure Senate advice and consent to this controversial and fatally flawed accord. The
centerpiece of this campaign is to be an international conclave convened in New York in
mid-September, nominally for the purpose of reviewing the CTBT’s progress toward
entry-into-force.
Its real objective, however, is provide the Administration with artificial
leverage on Senators
who otherwise see no reason to give this treaty priority over other, more pressing legislative
matters. ¹ A similar tactic was employed successfully in
1997 to buffalo Members of the Senate
into approving another defective arms control agreement, the Chemical Weapons Convention. ²
It is to be hoped they won’t fall for this gambit again.

Clinton’s False Pretenses

The following were among the more egregious misrepresentations in Mr. Clinton’s
statement:

• “We have, today, a robust nuclear force.” The fact is that we are not
  sure whether today’s
  U.S. deterrent is “robust.” In the interval since 1992, when the United States
  unilaterally
  suspended its underground nuclear test program, officials at the national laboratories
  responsible for certifying the stockpile have been reduced to making informed guesses about
  the actual condition of our arsenal.

Historical experience suggests that, in the absence of performing actual nuclear tests,
it is entirely possible — if not actually likely — that some weapons in the
inventory
will not work according to their specifications. This possibility has become of
sufficient concern that one laboratory director has reportedly indicated recently that,
but for Mr. Clinton’s moratorium on nuclear explosions, a resumption of underground
testing would probably be judged to be desirable at this point.

• “Nuclear experts affirm that we can maintain a safe and reliable deterrent without nuclear
  tests.” Actually, some do; some don’t. In fact, until Mr. Clinton’s first Secretary of
  Energy Hazel O’Leary blackmailed the U.S. nuclear laboratories into agreeing to
  support the CTBT, virtually no one in positions of responsibility for the American
  deterrent believed that it could be safely and reliably maintained in the absence of
  periodic underground testing. ³

Today, even those in such positions who are still willing to argue that exacting safety
and reliability standards can be satisfied in the absence of testing insist that a host of
expensive new experimental facilities and techniques are required to permit stockpile
stewardship to be maintained. It is instructive, then, that anti-nuclear activists have —
as part of their increasingly shrill campaign for the CTBT — made clear in a form-letter now
being sent to Senators that they not only want a permanent halt to all U.S.
nuclear tests. They also want the Senate to reject investment in the equipment
that even the Clinton Administration claims (for the moment) is necessary to
ensure the future viability of the American deterrent.

• “If our Senate fails to act, the treaty cannot enter into force for any country.” The
  implication
  is that if, on the other hand, the Senate does act, the CTBT will come
  into force. This is not
  the case. Unless and until all other nuclear powers — including North Korea, which
  has
  shown no interest in joining the treaty regime — become state parties, the Comprehensive Test
  Ban cannot, by its own terms, come into force.

No Bar to Proliferation

President Clinton also made unwarranted claims about the positive effect the CTBT would
have
on others’ nuclear weapons programs. He declared: “The Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty will
strengthen our national security by constraining the development of more advanced and more
destructive nuclear weapons, and by limited the possibilities for more countries to acquire
nuclear weapons. It will also enhance our ability to detect suspicious activities by other nations.”

In fact, due to the inherent unverifiability of a “zero-yield” Comprehensive Test
Ban, there
is no way to say for certain whether other nations are exploiting the ability to conduct
undetectable low-yield and/or de-coupled tests to develop “more advanced and more
destructive nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, the United States is likely to be the only
one that
will be precluded from having modernized nuclear weapons by the CTBT and, thereby, denied
the systems it will need to assure the future effectiveness of our deterrent, and
therefore its
credibility.

More to the point, there is now an active world market for nuclear weapons-related
know-how and technology. Nations no longer need to test their own nuclear devices;
they can buy
tested ones from the likes of Russia and China. Moreover, the more crude the weapon design
and the lower the insistence on high performance effects (e.g., if one will settle for a low-yield
device sufficient to destroy a city and/or contaminate it with radioactive material, rather than one
capable of taking out a hardened underground silo), the more insensitive you can be about
actually testing the weapon’s performance. A nation like the United States, on the other hand —
with its exceedingly sophisticated and rapidly aging stockpile designed for specialized military
purposes, not “counter-value” attacks on population centers — is likely to be significantly
disadvantaged by a permanent test ban.

The Bottom Line

In his increasingly manic pursuit of a legacy other than that of bringing dishonor and
indignity to
his office, President Clinton is determined to secure an arms control trophy. Despite the fact that
yesterday’s speech failed to achieve critical mass in the press, Senators and the
American
people should be under no illusion: They will shortly be besieged by a well-funded,
organized and disciplined disinformation campaign aimed at securing the CTBT’s
approval that has been planned for months by the Administration’s senior-level
anti-nuclear
cadre and their allies in non-governmental organizations.

Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, is right to
insist that there are more urgent international treaty obligations that should be receiving the
Senate’s attention. These include the Clinton-Gore Administration’s efforts to breathe new life
into the lapsed 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. ⁴ After
all, given the President’s abiding
determination to prevent the expeditious deployment of competent missile defenses, the United
States has no alternative but to ensure that its nuclear deterrent is as modern and robust as
possible.

At the appropriate time, the Senate should take up the CTBT. When it does so,
however, it
should be with a view not to approving the treaty but to defeating it as an accord that
is
inconsistent with U.S. national security requirements and irrelevant to the sort of
proliferation threat that is far better addressed by the deployment of real anti-missile
systems and other defensive measures — not the embrace of additional phony and
counterproductive arms control accords.

¹Such is the Administration’s cynicism when it comes to
fabricating this sort of leverage, that it
is convening this review conference fully one year in advance of the date it is
supposed to be
held under the CTBT’s terms.

² For more on the CWC’s defects and the legislative history of the
debate concerning that
accord, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled C.W.C. Watch
#1: Russia Defers Ratification,
Seeks Payments For Compliance and a ‘Seat At The Table’ Anyway (No. href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_59″>97-D 59, 30 April
1997).

³ See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
The Most Important Justification for Firing Hazel
O’Leary: Her Role in Denuclearizing the United States ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_90″>No. 95-D 90, 10 November 1995).

⁴See Definitive Study Shows Russians Have No
Veto Over Defending U.S. (No. 99-P 11, 22
January 1999).