Boulder Sunday Camera, Op-Ed Sunday
November 26, 2000
Almost exactly one year ago an important foreign policy issue was being debated in the U.S. Senate concerning the proposition whether or not United States should participate in a treaty to ban all future underground nuclear tests. The treaty, known as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and the ensuing debate were prominent in the news media at the time and national polls clearly indicated that public opinion (83%) was in favor of U.S. ratification. Despite its popularity the CTBT was rejected by the Republican controlled Senate in October 1999. Since that time the President has made bold promises to reopen the debate for ratification but scant attention has been devoted to the CTBT this election year by the Administration and it has been totally absent thus far from the presidential and vice presidential debates.
However, this is not to say that the public has forgotten or changed its mind on this subject. A recent analysis (www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org, September 29, 2000) by the independent social science research group, Center on Policy Attitudes, University of Maryland, on the results of its own poll shows a huge disparity between what the candidates are talking about and what the public actually believes and what it wants to hear debated. The main findings of the COPA are that Americans are concerned about the growing gap between the rich and the poor; the downside of international trade that discriminates against workers, the environment and human rights; and the fact that forty-three million Americans lack health insurance. Whereas, both presidential candidates are pushing for increased defense spending, the public prefers that these moneys be redirected to such matters as improving education, paying down the national debt and strengthening Social Security. And, although the political rhetoric on defense is dominated by talk of modernizing weapons systems, Americans (80%) still care about the residue of the Cold War, the part of foreign policy that deals with the megatons of nuclear explosive residing in stockpiles and missile silos around the world, i.e., CTBT.
Despite its apparent present apathy the public has never totally lost sight of the fact that nuclear weapons pose a continuing threat to the future of civilization. An abiding imperative of American foreign policy in the Cold War era has been the need to remove or at least to mitigate the threat of nuclear holocaust by means of negotiated diplomatic bilateral and multilateral agreements, steadily pressing towards the ultimate goal of total nuclear disarmament. A pre-eminent early achievement in this endeavor was the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty of 1968 which was extended indefinitely by the Clinton Administration in May 1995. More recently in September 1996, with the concurrence of a bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress, President Clinton signed the CTBT at the United Nations. However, the Senate's October 1999 rejection of the CTBT came as a shock to domestic as well as world opinion, an astonishing negative act of foreign policy unprecedented in scope, magnitude and consequence since the Senate's (also Republican) rejection of the Treaty of Versailles in November 1919. Short-sighted and self-serving this act cannot erase the fact that Russia still maintains its formidable nuclear arsenal; out of mind, the issue is by no means out of sight.
In turning back the clock of nuclear disarmament to the benighted policies of a recent past, Americans are reminded that bad ideas do not necessarily remain dormant just because they are proven to be insidious and inane. Half a year after the failure of nuclear disarmament talks at Reykjavik, at the commencement of the 1988 presidential campaign, President Reagan chose to "broaden" the provisions of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, in place with Russia since 1972, in order to allow then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger to forge ahead with an agenda to deploy Phase I of SDI by the early 1990s. In a similarly designed strategy, the present Senate Republican majority's purported purpose for rejecting the CTBT was to preserve the maintainability of America's present nuclear arsenal. It was in reality, however, a surreptitious ploy to clear a path for new generations of U.S. nuclear weaponry, including a reincarnation of SDI.
The CTBT, popular among world leaders as the next logical step towards total
nuclear disarmament, was signed by 154 countries including the major nuclear
weapons states, viz., the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain and France.
However, thus far CTBT has been ratified by only 24 of today's 44 nuclear
capable nations. The failure of the United States to ratify this Treaty looms
ominously large now because of the acknowledged unwillingness of certain nuclear
powers, notably Russia, China, India and Pakistan, to ratify in the face of a
U.S. defection.
The contrived arguments against this Treaty advanced by its opponents in the
U.S. Congress appear even more pernicious because so-called 'rogue nations'
hostile to the U.S. may perceive that entry into the nuclear club is now
possible on the tacit understanding that the non-proliferation rules no longer
apply. Furthermore, Treaty opponents deliberately ignore its built-in safeguards
for nations such as the U.S. and its allies who must continue to maintain a
credible nuclear deterrent. As nuclear technology becomes more and more
accessible the free world still lacks the means to rein in the truculent
aspirations of emerging powers or to cope with the uncertainties posed by old
adversaries destabilized by internal economic and political travail.
The Department of Energy (acting under its mandate to administer, preserve and protect the nation's nuclear arsenal) daily carries out an exacting program of surveillance, component testing and remanufacture of its present weapon stockpile. This program is designed to ensure that the nation's nuclear deterrence is not compromised by either aging, sabotage or neglect of the weapons under its purview. In full compliance with existing treaties, DoE has instituted virtual testing by means of computer simulations in place of nuclear explosions. Zero-yield experiments by simulation, complemented with zero-yield laboratory tests employing fissile materials, obtain vastly more information on the reliability and efficiency of each weapon type than actual explosions which CTBT opponents now wish to resume but which are specifically excluded by CTBT.
CTBT does not require participating nations to relinquish their present inventory of nuclear weapons or even to reduce their numbers, however desirable that goal may appear at this time. Specifically, Article I states in part, "Each State Party undertakes not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion..." Prohibition of nuclear explosions is expressly prohibited by CTBT whereas stockpile maintenance is not for the simple reason that explosive tests are necessary in confirming new weapon systems but maintenance of existing systems requires no such tests. This stark fact belies the specious reasoning of Treaty opponents and exposes their true agenda.
The clear motivation of this Treaty is to impede the further spread of nuclear weapons to states that do not now have them and to preclude advances in cunning and lethality of new weapons systems in states that are currently nuclear armed. However much the military commanders in CTBT states may have wished to continue weapons development, the political leaders of those states signing the CTBT wisely chose to terminate all explosive tests, each state surrendering a modicum of its national security for the greater good of international cooperation towards a nuclear-free world.
The concepts, explicit and implicit, contained in the CTBT represent the collective will of the community of nations to end the unrestricted proliferation of nuclear weapons which has characterized the post war era. By no means the end or even the culmination of this effort it is a necessary component in a web of multilateral treaties where each participating party accepts constraints on its ability to wage nuclear war on the premise that its own security interests are best served where the security interests of all nations are in common and are mutually served. The Republican controlled Senate committed a colossal blunder in rejecting the CTBT. President Clinton however has assured the nation that the "fight is far from over. When all is said and done," he said, "the United States will ratify the treaty."
Howard Garcia