Test Ban Or Unilateral Disarmament Treaty? By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. Investor’s Business Daily, 13 September 1999

The utopians in the Clinton camp have set their sights on another nuclear weapons treaty. It’s not designed to preserve U.S. military capability, but rather to disarm it.

A major campaign is on to press the U.S. Senate to approve ratification of the controversial arms control accord, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). It’s intended to ban permanently all nuclear weapons tests.

For the better part of 50 years, such testing has been relied upon by successive Republican and Democratic administrations to assure the safety, reliability and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear deterrent.

Now we are told by the Clinton team and its allies that our arsenal will be able to continue to meet this exacting standard for the indefinite future without conducting another underground detonation.

What is extraordinary is that the claim is being made by many of the same people who regularly rail that the Pentagon is not doing enough to test its weapons systems to ensure that they will perform as advertised.

For example, such critics challenge the realism of the two successful intercepts recently achieved by the Theater High Altitude Area Defense missile defense system. Then there is the complaint that too much computer modeling and too little rigorous pre-production testing has been done to permit further procurement of the Air Force’s impressive next-generation fighter, the F-22.

So one might ask of CTBT proponents: Which is it going to be? Can we settle for computer modeling and simulations? Or is realistic testing essential if we are to trust our security and tax dollars to sophisticated weaponry?

Their answer? It depends: As long as the CTBT remains unratified, the administration position seems likely to remain that we can rely upon the current nuclear inventory, and simulations will assure their reliability. But simulations won’t allow us to develop new weapons.

Thus, it would be hard to modernize the inventory as strategic circumstances change. For instance, how could we know if a new, deep-penetrating warhead will take out a hardened underground bunker if we can’t test it?

Should the Senate give its advice and consent to this accord, however, that line seems sure to change. Then the CTBT’s proponents will revert to form, free to acknowledge the obvious: The existing stockpile – comprised increasingly of obsolescing weapons -cannot be maintained without testing, either. So by their logic, the next move would be to just retire all the weapons.

Consider the October 1997 congressional testimony of then-Assistant Secretary of Energy for Defense Programs Victor Reis: ”Just about all the parts (of our present nuclear weapons) are going to have to be remade.”No responsible scientists could promise, in the absence of explosive testing, that completely remanufactured thermonuclear devices will work as advertised. And no one will be arguing that point more vociferously than the antinuclear activists who are pushing the CTBT.

When challenged on this score, the White House blithely asserts it is pursuing a $ 40 billion Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) to address such quality-control issues down the road.

Unfortunately, this capability will materialize – if at all – a long way down the road. It will take some 10 years to construct new facilities to house the various exotic experimental diagnostic technologies that are supposed to provide the same confidence about the performance of our nuclear stockpile as does nuclear testing.

Plus, no one knows for sure whether the SSP will actually pan out. Even before the CTBT is ratified, many of the treaty’s supporters are urging Congress to delete the billions being sought each year for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility and its counterpart facilities at the other nuclear labs.

Even if properly funded and brought on line as scheduled, though, it is unclear that the simulations provided by these experimental devices will be as accurate as underground detonations. And, of course, a test ban will preclude the one scientifically rigorous way of proving the simulations’ accuracy.

The bottom line is that U.S. national security demands that we field nothing but systematically and rigorously tested military systems, both conventional and nuclear. To be sure, computer simulations can contribute significantly to reducing the cost and the length of time it takes to develop and deploy such weapons. But we cannot afford to let any weapon -least of all the most important ones in our arsenal, our nuclear deterrent -go untested and unproven.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C.