Abstract
Lugar was mistaken
Many of the arguments Richard Lugar uses against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) (“Better Safe …,” January/February Bulletin) were also discussed by Wolfgang Panofsky and other authors in the same issue. But Lugar makes certain erroneous assertions about the CTBT's verification provisions that need to be corrected.
The problem of verifiability was said to be a major reason why the U.S. Senate rejected the treaty last October. Lugar's imprecision on verifiability may also be indicative of a general suspicion in the United States about the effectiveness of multilateral verification provisions.
Lugar criticizes the on-site inspection provisions of the treaty as inadequate on two grounds: First, he correctly states that 30 of the 51 members of the treaty's executive council would have to support a request to make an inspection. But it is a matter of political judgment whether one views this authorization procedure as a problem.
During the CTBT negotiations the United States unsuccessfully argued for a “red light” provision, which would have made it easier to launch an inspection. But Washington prevailed on other important points. For example, the United States successfully argued that all information, including that gathered through its national technical means, could be considered by the executive council before an inspection decision was made. That puts the United States, with its superior information collection technology, at a considerable advantage.
Secondly, Senator Lugar wrongly asserts that the inspected state “can declare a 50-square-kilometer area of its territory as off limits to any inspections that are approved.” A look at the treaty text would have been sufficient to correct this statement. Under the CTBT, inspected states do have the right to declare up to 50 square kilometers of their territory as “restricted-access sites.” But this does not mean that the area is an “inspection-free zone,” as the senator claims. In fact, the CTBT states that “if at any time the inspection team demonstrates credibly … that the necessary activities authorized in the mandate could not be carried out from the outside [of the restricted-access site] … some members of the inspection team shall be granted access to accomplish specific tasks within the site.”
The exact details of access to such a site must be negotiated between inspectors and the authorities of the inspected state and are subject to managed access provisions that are part of all modern nonproliferation and arms control verification regimes. To compare this provision to the controversy over the inspection of Iraq's presidential palaces is misleading. Verification regimes have to be judged on the basis of what they are supposed to achieve. It requires less intrusive measures to identify a nuclear test than it does to find traces of a hidden biological weapons program. The CTBT's verification regime is in no way “the embodiment of everything the United States has been fighting against in the UNSCOM inspection process,” as Lugar argues.
This point has broader implications because U.S. policy on on-site inspections is increasingly schizophrenic. On the one hand, Washington insists on stringent on-site inspection procedures during most arms control negotiations, but it is quite reluctant to actually accept and implement such provisions when it comes to inspecting U.S. facilities.
During the Cold War, it was the Soviet Union's fear of intrusive verification arrangements that often prevented progress in arms control. Today, it is increasingly the United States that stands in the way of strong verification provisions. The United States took two years to pass domestic legislation to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention (which Lugar praises as an example of good verification). That legislation, finally passed last year, contains conditions that effectively block full inspection of U.S. chemical facilities.
The Senate's debate on the chemical treaty was proof of the reluctance to accept foreign inspectors in U.S. chemical weapons defense sites and industrial facilities. Furthermore, many argue that similar fears are responsible for the lack of U.S. leadership in the negotiations on a verification protocol for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Many delegations in Geneva stand ready to wrap up those negotiations this year, but the U.S. delegation seems to be preoccupied with managing its own interagency rivalries.
Against this background, it is very difficult to see how the United States will one day accept inspections of its nuclear weapons complex under a multilateral agreement on fissile materials, which is the next proposal on the international arms control agenda.
“You're nobody until somebody bugs you, Hendricks.”
The United States has little experience with multilateral on-site inspections, which may partly explain why so many false allegations, misrepresentations, and misleading statements dominated the Senate debate about the CTBT's verifiability. If the United States wants to remain an active supporter of multilateral nonproliferation and arms control agreements, it is essential in the future that such debates be conducted in a balanced, open, and thorough manner.
Oliver Meier
Verification Research, Training, and Information Centre (VERTIC), London
Mad about “nukes”
I was appalled to see the coverline on the January/February issue–“Still Mad About Nukes.” As the editors of one of the most respected publications on the issues of nuclear weapons and their terrible consequences, you should have thought twice about using such language in your publication, let alone on the cover.
Using words like “nuke” is psychologically harmful, downplaying as it does the horror that is a nuclear weapon. Putting such language on the cover sends a clear message to the public that these are things to be joked about, to be taken lightly.
The public's idea that these issues are of no great importance is reinforced when friendly and “nice” words are used by a respected publication. How can we hope to make any progress, and how can the Doomsday Clock ever be “dismantled”?
I hope that you seriously consider the message that you are sending to the general public, and the effect it has on our world as a whole.
Was the Holocaust ever called the “Holly,” or the concentration camps described as “concy camps”? That would be unacceptable, and we need to lead the effort to make sure the public knows that nuclear weapons are just as horrible.
Scott C. Boultinghouse
Hays, Kansas
More accountability needed
The defeat in the Senate of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), as described in the January/February Bulletin, should disgust all Americans.
I know about the jingoism of many senators; I know all about the chauvinism and egocentrism of some members of the Senate, people who really believe that the United States is destined to be the one and only superpower, a power that can exert its will as it chooses and ignore the rest of the world and its opinions–that is, a country that can behave as a truly rogue nation.
But I never imagined that the entire body of Republican senators would substitute inside-the-Beltway hatreds and maneuverings for their sworn duty to serve the people of the United States, a people who, according to repeated polls, support the treaty at the 80 percent level.
These senators, blinded by the claims of armament builders, discarded an international security measure advocated by nearly all the nations of the world.
While these men gloried in embarrassing the president, President Bill Clinton's presentation of the treaty to the Senate for ratification was a truly incomprehensible event. Newspapers, TV analysts, and political savants tell us that Clinton is a great and clever politician. But even a cursory survey of senators would have told him it would be impossible to obtain a positive vote by two-thirds of the present Senate.
If this supremely clever politician really wanted the CTBT, he should have left it on the table. Also, after raising the issue, he should have marshaled the cadre of experts who had convinced an earlier Congress of the mon-itorability of a test ban and that the supposed technical arguments against a test ban treaty were false. Also, he would have addressed the American people on the issue. He did none of these things. I conclude that Clinton is either very stupid or that he deliberately destroyed the treaty for reasons not yet obvious.
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty can be monitored. In 1965, I left a professorship at Berkeley to work in various government organizations: the Air Force Technical Applications Center, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and the United States Geological Survey. My research focus from 1965 to 1990 was on the scientific problem of monitoring a CTBT.
By 1985, seismologists had solved the problem of detecting and identifying very small (fraction of a kiloton) nuclear explosions via a seismic network that almost certainly could have been negotiated with the Soviet Union.
The Office of Technology Assessment's review of this research (mine and others) was accepted as authoritative by Congress. A feasible worldwide network could have established an effective one-kiloton threshold detection system.
Because Congress in the early 1990s knew that a low-threshold treaty effectively constituted a comprehensive ban, both the House and the Senate approved and required the negotiation of such a ban by 1996. President Bush, albeit reluctantly, signed the bill containing that requirement.
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I should emphasize that no one believed that a seismic network would detect and identify the smallest imaginable nuclear test. But no one cared. Using seismological and other techniques, U.S. scientists had done everything required to ensure the security of the United States against clandestine underground, underwater, atmospheric, or extra-atmospheric clandestine testing programs at other than irrelevant low levels.
The first underground tests of any new nuclear country would be 10 kilotons or greater–an easily detectable level. Meanwhile, countries with well-developed warhead designs would find no purpose in clandestine testing below the network's effective threshold.
While still in office, President Reagan and then President Bush admitted that a CTBT could be monitored. Thus, arguments made during the Senate “debate” last fall that the treaty was not monitorable were based either on ignorance or deliberate lies.
I agree with those who suggest that it would have been far wiser for the other nations of the world not to have coerced Clinton into signing a “zero-yield” treaty of unlimited duration. A one-kiloton-threshold test ban treaty would have given a credible alternative to nervous senators.
But in last fall's debate, the weapons labs tried everything possible to make senators nervous about the treaty. It has always been so. In earlier years, the weapons labs raised any number of false bugaboos calculated to make a test ban treaty seem dangerous. Two of numerous examples:
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the stability of warheads in storage was questioned until Congress requested a definitive study. At the moment of delivery of the full body of facts, the argument completely disintegrated.
“You can't blow up that one either, General. That's Hawaii.”
There is not now nor has there ever been any evidence of failure of warheads placed in storage after full testing. (The only possible example of problems developing in storage concerned a warhead that was developed and placed in storage without testing during the Eisenhower-Khrushchev moratorium.)
Today there is a program of disassembly, inspection, and refurbishing of all warheads, and they are recharged with tritium. The risk of warheads becoming nonfunctional is zero. The reliability of the launchers is probably much lower than is the reliability of the warheads.
In the late 1980s, Lawrence Liver-more National Laboratory declassified a highly classified document that purported to present an effective evasion scenario largely based on seismology. Two of its employees were forced to affix their names to the declassified document, even though neither of them had anything whatever to do with the generation of the original classified document. The unclassified version was published in Nature.
After writing the seismological part of the classified document, I had conducted further unclassified research, which had long since shown that the evasion scenario would fail–that the evidence would easily point to a nuclear explosion.
I don't really know whom I blame most for the demise of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Bill Clinton or the Republican leaders of the Senate. I do know that this country needs a constitutional amendment creating a federal initiative and referendum–a national (albeit electronic) town meeting.
If there was a federal initiative and referendum, the will of the citizenry relative to a CTBT (and numerous other measures) would long ago have been met. If I were 28 instead of 78, I would try to make this a national issue. A little chaos along the way for sure, but what discipline it would bring upon these senatorial oligarchs.
What fun it would be to see Jesse Helms's vote overturned by the citizens of his own state. How joyous to see the demise of such betrayers of democracy as the political action committees, which now dominate our inadequate congressmen.
If we had had a federal initiative and referendum, the outcome of the test-ban vote would have been far different.
Jack F. Everden
Denver, Colorado