/IPS ENVIRONMENT BULLETIN/ DISARMAMENT: Large U.N. Majority Will Back Test Ban Treaty

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 7 1996 (IPS) - Supporters of a nuclear test ban are confident that a treaty to prohibit all nuclear test explosions will win the support of a wide majority at the United Nations next Monday.

That high level of support, argue the treaty’s backers, will pave the way for a drive to prod nations to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) over the next month here, and lead quickly to a widely accepted moratorium on nuclear tests.

“It’s very likely there will never be another nuclear test” following the likely approval for the treaty by the 185-member U.N. General Assembly next week, says U.S. Ambassador James Leonard, a long-time nuclear disarmament negotiator.

Other experts are similarly upbeat about the CTBT’s chances. “We’re on the eve of an enormous victory,” predicts Daryl Kimball, director of security programmes for Physicians for Social Responsibility, an anti-nuclear group.

Leonard estimates that some 110 nations already are willing to sign and ratify the treaty, which bans all test explosions, whether in space, underground, on land or sea.

The treaty’s backers predict a similarly high level of support in the General Assembly next Monday. Ambassador Richard Butler of Australia, which is leading the push for the Assembly to approve the treaty, says he looks forward to overwhelming support for the measure, including perhaps 100 co-sponsors to Australia’s resolution approving the CTBT.

At least 70 countries have already agreed not merely to approve the resolution, but to block any amendments to it and to round up other supporters, as well.

Analysts say that Australia’s effort is now being backed fully by all of Eastern and Western Europe, every Latin American state except Mexico and Colombia, and many Asian and African states. More co-sponsors are expected before Monday, Butler adds.

Just two weeks after India blocked the CTBT from winning consensus approval at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, such support is a dramatic reversal of fortune for the treaty.

Despite two years of negotiations, lingering doubts over the treaty prompted several nations to question its merits in Geneva last month, and India ended the pact’s chances to become a Conference-approved treaty by blocking it outright.

“The draft that has emerged after more than two years of negotiations in Geneva tragically fell short of our hopes and visions of a genuinely Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” argues Prakash Shah, India’s U.N. ambassador.

Shah contends the treaty to be presented to the General Assembly next week would merely preserve a nuclear status quo. It would allow the world’s five declared nuclear powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — to continue with advanced computer-based testing, while preventing other nations from similarly upgrading their nuclear efforts, he argues.

India, along with its fellow nuclear ‘threshold’ states Pakistan and Israel, is required under the terms of the CTBT to sign the pact within three years before the treaty can take effect. But, rather than accept a treaty that would force India to ratify it, New Delhi blocked the Committee’s draft and has vowed to oppose Australia’s resolution.

“There are a lot of people who don’t like this treaty,” concedes Dan Plesch, director of the British-American Security Information Council. Yet the treaty, he argues, is a major step forward — particularly in the battle to halt the five nuclear powers’ weapons programmes.

Despite India’s argument that the treaty still would allow computer-based tests, Plesch notes, many forces in the five nuclear states — from the Republican Party in the United States to defense ministry officials in Britain and Russia — oppose the treaty because it would hinder efforts to improve their weapons technology.

“If ever there was a treaty which one could call the People’s Treaty, this is it,” Plesch argues. What has brought the CTBT to its present point, he says, is not the interests of the nuclear powers’ governments but massive popular support for disarmament.

The Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, a Washington-based think tank, notes that more than 70 percent of the U.S. public has consistently favoured an end to nuclear testing in a series of polls taken over the past 30 years. In the most recent poll, conducted in 1994, 80 percent of respondents agreed that President Bill Clinton “should push to get a nuclear test ban.”

Citizen pressure, argues Kimball, has been at the forefront of the push to ban nuclear testing for the past 40 years.

Most recently, France’s decision last year to conduct test explosions at two Pacific Ocean atolls earned it widespread public condemnation, including several international boycotts, until France declared its own moratorium on testing this year.

“The reaction to French nuclear testing…was a shock to the White House, Whitehall, and indeed the French,” Plesch says.

As a result, all five nuclear states, despite their reservations, have agreed to sign the CTBT. “It’s a really unique situation where you have all five nuclear states agreeing to put their signatures to a text,” Leonard says.

But Indian officials say the treaty will be meaningless since New Delhi has no intention to sign it. Because of the clause requiring India’s signature before the CTBT enters into force, they say, many countries right now are supporting the treaty knowing full well that it will not take effect.

Leonard counters that the treaty nevertheless will bind all its signatories, including in all likelihood all five declared nuclear states, even if India holds out. Moreover, if the treaty is not ratified by 44 nations, including India, within the next three years, the treaty calls for an international conference to work out any snags to its implementation.

Ultimately, Kimball says, the stakes are high next week for nations to show as much support as they can muster to support the CTBT. On the one side, he argues, is the chance to end test explosions after more than 2,000 nuclear tests in the past 50 years, as well as the environmental ruin caused by such tests.

On the other, the treaty’s backers claim, is the failure of a four-decade disarmament drive, and the chance of a new arms race.