US ratification of test ban treaty will take time, says US official

Twenty years after the US conducted its last nuclear test, there still is “no set time frame” for the Obama administration to seek ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), a key administration official said, and other nations should proceed to ratify the accord without waiting for the US. Rose Gottemoeller , acting undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, also said that despite the deepening fiscal crunch, President Obama remains firmly committed to ensuring sufficient funding to keep the US nuclear weapons stockpile in good working condition and to modernizing the decrepit weapons complex. Those pledges, she noted, are critical to obtaining the necessary vote of two-thirds of senators to ratify the CTBT.

Gottemoeller, who spoke at the nonprofit organization American Security Project on 26 September, stated that the administration wants to take all necessary time to ensure that senators understand the CTBT, which she said is a “complex treaty with many technical issues.”

The US is one of eight remaining nations that must ratify the CTBT in order for the accord to enter into force. The others are China, Egypt, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and Iran. Like the US, all nations believed to have nuclear weapons capability except India, Pakistan, and North Korea have refrained from testing since before the CTBT was first opened for signing in 1996. Russia, France, and the UK&mash;three declared nuclear weapons states&mash;have ratified the treaty.

When the CTBT was last put before the Senate in 1999 by President Bill Clinton, the lawmakers rejected it mostly out of concern over the technical capacity to ensure compliance with the treaty. Since that time, the International Monitoring System (IMS) has been under construction by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) Preparatory Commission. Though not yet complete, the IMS worldwide network of seismic, hydroacoustic, radionuclide, and infrasound detection stations is already capable of detecting with 90% certainty fully coupled underground nuclear blasts of 1 kiloton or greater anywhere in the world, according to Lassina Zerbo, director of the CTBTO’s International Data Centre Division, Provisional Technical Secretariat. (A fully coupled explosion is one in which no attempt has been made to hide the test by, for example, detonating a device in a cavern or a mine.) In addition to the IMS, hundreds of other research organizations that operate thousands of seismic monitoring stations have an independent capability to detect underground tests, said Paul Richards, special research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. And multiple individual nations, including the US, have their own technical means, such as satellites, to detect nuclear test ban cheats. Indeed, a March National Academies report, The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty: Technical Issues for the United States , asserted that US detection capability was superior to that of the IMS.