Is the CTBT D.O.A.?

Posted By: Kari Lipschutz, World Politics Review

Date: February 9, 2010

Kari Lipschutz wrote this piece for the World Politics Review blog.

"The CTBT is in big, big trouble," said Stephen Rademaker at an East West Institute roundtable on the ever-stalled Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty last Friday. The remark represented a rare area of consensus on what is otherwise a highly divisive issue.

The EWI discussion of the CTBT and its likelihood of ratification by Congress came as a complement to a recently published report by the institute on the subject. With Rademaker, former U.S. assistant secretary of state (2002-2006) and currently senior counsel for BGR Group's Government Affairs division, and Ambassador Robert T. Grey, Jr., director of the Bipartisan Security Group, at the helm, the talk navigated attendees through the acronyms, speed bumps and technicalities of the CTBT debate.

According to the EWI report, a better case can now be made for the CTBT than in 1999, when Congress initially voted down the treaty, due to technological gains made since then. But as the roundtable discussion revealed, though these advances -- including a more robust International Monitoring System (IMS) -- are significant, ratification will still be complicated by geopolitics, semantics, and domestic issues.

According to both the EWI report and discussion participants, before the CTBT can ever move forward, it must be amended to better define what an "explosion" really is. Some nations, such as Russia, interpret the current definition to authorize small-scale tests that are not "militarily significant." Others, such as the United States, believe the treaty allows no nuclear testing whatsoever -- a zero-yield stance. "Divergence is a fatal flaw that needs to be corrected," said Rademaker.

However, as EWI Senior Associate Jacqueline McLaren Miller pointed out, even if the treaty ultimately does explicitly adopt a zero-yield stance, the question will be, can available technology monitor militarily significant tests—and here, Miller says, the answers are much more favorable than ten years ago. Concerns over cheating the monitoring systems are real for CTBT opponents, and Russia was mentioned as a power that may take liberties in this gray area if "cheating" cannot be proven.

The talk was heavily attended by U.N. Mission representatives from relevant CTBT countries -- including Iran and Egypt (two of the nine signatures still needed among Annex II countries), as well as the United States and South Korea. The former two were both identified by Rademaker as governments that may try to use their ratification of the CTBT as a bargaining tool to make geopolitical gains -- for Iran, as leverage in its ongoing nuclear tug of war; for Egypt, as pressure on the international community to push Israel to sign the NPT. "Egypt has a very similar game [to that of Iran] . . . They want to be holding the keys to the kingdom," Rademaker said.

Just last month, President Barack Obama announced that spending for nuclear weapons and security would amount to more than $5 billion over the next five years. If, as the administration says, nonproliferation is the name of the game, why bulk up on arms when, according to the EWI report, the ones we have will suffice? Rademaker pointed to countries such as Japan and Taiwan that rely on the U.S. nuclear umbrella as a security guarantee, arguing that, since nuclear warheads are man-made, they require maintenance. But Ambassador Grey did not share this logic. "This is not the way to walk into a new century," said Grey. "Stockpiles are poison."

With all of these seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way of treaty ratification and nuclear nonproliferation, why bother?

"Is it in our national interest to do so?" asked Ambassador Grey. "I think it is."

And with a total of 151 countries having ratified the treaty to date, a majority of the world's policymakers believe it's in the international interest to do so as well. What remains to be seen is whether reports such as the one from EWI -- as well as the Nuclear Posture Review due out on March 1 -- will be enough to coax the necessary 67 votes from Congress to make the United States country no. 152.

Event:

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Comments (2)

Corrections

The CTBT DOES NOT need to be amended to clarify what a "nuclear test explosion" is. An explosion is an explosion and the CTBT bans all nuclear explosions, just as the LTBT banned all nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and outer space.
Furthermore, in 1999, when asked if the CTBT negotiating record is clear on the point of banning low-yield tests including hydronuclear tests, the US CTBT negotiator Amb. Stephen Ledogar testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “The answer is a categoric ‘yes.’ The Russians, as well as the other weapon states, did commit themselves. That answer is substantiated by the record of the negotiations at almost any level of technicality (and national security classification) that is desired and permitted.
More importantly for the current debate, it is also substantiated by the public record of statements by high level Russian officials. For example, the Russian government made it clear when it ratified the CTBT in 2000 that: “Qualitative modernization of nuclear weapons is only possible through full-scale and hydronuclear tests with the emission of fissile energy, the carrying out of which directly contradicts the CTBT.” In other words, it is clear to all that the CTBT establishes a “zero-yield” prohibition on nuclear test explosions.
The "lack of a definition" issue is simply a red herring.
A 2002 National Academy of Sciences panel determined that “underground nuclear explosions can be reliably detected and can be identified as explosions, using IMS data down to a yield of 0.1 kilotons (100 tons) in hard rock if conducted anywhere in Europe, Asia, North Africa and North America.” Advances in regional seismology have provided additional confidence. For some locations (such as Russia’s former nuclear test site at Novaya Zemlya) the use of new seismic arrays and regionally located seismic stations has lowered the detection threshold to below 0.01 kilotons. Advances in new technologies, such as noble gas monitoring, provide powerful new detection capabilities.
A common argument leveled against the CTBT by some skeptics is that very low-yield nuclear explosions, including so-called hydronuclear tests, cannot be detected with absolute certainty. However, this argument misses the point on verification and implies that low-yield tests are militarily significant. Explosions below a few hundred tons in yield—potentially at a low enough yield to evade detection—are not very useful in assessing a new nuclear warhead design.
CTBT skeptics have also suggested that it may be possible for some states to use evasion techniques to try to hide full-scale nuclear tests. But according to the NAS panel report, “those countries that are best able to successfully conduct such clandestine testing already possess advanced nuclear weapons of a number of types and could add little, with additional testing, to the threats they already pose to the United States. Countries of lesser nuclear test experience and/or design sophistication would be unable to conceal tests in the numbers and yields required to master weapons more advanced than the ones they could develop and deploy without any testing at all."

Please also note that ACA will be releasing a 50 page report that thoroughly addresses issues related to the CTBT next week.

Sincerely, Daryl Kimball, Arms Control Association

Posted by on Wed, 2010-02-10 16:20.

Response

Mr. Kimball assures us that “The ‘lack of a definition’ issue is simply a red herring.” No doubt he is confident this is true. But if the CTBT comes again before the Senate, most Senators will be more interested in the conclusions of the bipartisan Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States than in the opinions of arms control activists. In its May 2009 report, the Commission unanimously recommended that “To prepare the way for Senate re-review of the CTBT, the administration should . . . secure P-5 agreement on a clear and precise definition of banned and permitted test activity.”

Considering the composition of this Commission—including such arms control stalwarts as William Perry, John Glenn, Lee Hamilton, and Morton Halperin—it is hard to imagine that this recommendation was made idly or in the absence of a perceived problem. Indeed, John Glenn subsequently elaborated on this recommendation in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He stated “I would favor CTBT, but I would only vote for it if it had better definition. Right now the -- the Russians do not have an agreement with us as far as I know on exactly what it is we're agreeing to.”

At a minimum, one of the key challenges facing the Obama Administration as it considers how to bring the CTBT before the Senate again is figuring out how to deal with the Commission’s unanimous recommendation that it first negotiate a “clear and precise definition” of what the treaty prohibits. The path of least resistance would be to disregard the Commission's recommendation and argue, as Mr. Kimball does, that the issue is a red herring. But presenting the treaty without such an agreed definition will likely be seen by treaty skeptics as confirmation that there are unbridgeable differences in interpretation between the parties. If Mr. Kimball is right, negotiating such a definition should be no problem at all. Time will tell whether he is right.

Stephen G. Rademaker Senior Counsel BGR Holding, LLC

Posted by on Sat, 2010-02-13 08:28.

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