DISARMAMENT: U.S. Lagging on Treaties Could Hurt Nuclear Progress

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 11 1997 (IPS) - U.S. delays in ratifying weapons treaties are sending disturbing signals to other nations that Washington may not be able to commit itself to reducing its nuclear arsenal, nuclear experts say.

Some non-governmental groups following the progress of closed- door talks here on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) worry that the slow progress of several treaties — including the Chemical Weapons Convention, which the U.S. Senate has failed to approve — have dampened confidence in further U.S. disarmament steps.

Now, the same right-wing bloc in the Senate that is refusing to pass the Chemical Weapons Convention may also turn against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), signed by more than 140 nations since the U.N. General Assembly approved it last September. The chemical weapons pact was pulled from the Senate last September when it appeared that Senate Republicans had the votes to defeat it.

Joseph Cirincione, executive director of the U.S.-based Committee on Nuclear Policy, says that ultra-right Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, may pose just as much of an obstacle to the CTBT or to the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START II) with Russia as he has done on the chemical weapons pact.

“If the CTBT is not ratified…everything would begin to unravel” in the current disarmament process, Cirincione says. “There is great fear that, if any of these blocks is pulled out, the whole structure (of nuclear weapons negotiations) will collapse.”

Part of the problem is that the CTBT, which would prohibit all nuclear tests, cannot take effect if key nations like the United States and India do not ratify it — as India says it will not do. But he adds, “India aside, how do we know that the United States will ratify it? Just look at what Jesse Helms is doing with the Chemical Weapons Convention.”

“If the Chemical Weapons Convention is rendered meaningless through U.S. inaction, negotiations to provide the Biological Weapons Convention with a verification protocol and initiatives to reduce nuclear dangers could be stymied as well,” argues a report issued last month by the Henry Stimson Centre, a centrist, Washington-based think tank.

Without progress on those initiatives, the Stimson Centre adds, some U.S. and other officials “will continue the need to retain — or acquire — nuclear weapons as countermeasures,” continuing the arms race.

More importantly, diplomats in Washington are giving no signal at the current NPT review here of considering additional disarmament steps beyond those already agreed to, says Dan Plesch, director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC).

“Nuclear policy is way down low on their radar” in Washington, Cirincione adds.

Washington has already agreed to a ban on nuclear tests and a push to implement the START II reductions, as well as to negotiate START III reductions with Russia, says Lawrence Scheinman, the U.S. representative to the NPT talks.

At their talks last month in Helsinki, Presidents Bill Clinton of the United States and Boris Yeltsin of Russia agreed that the START III process would place a ceiling of between 2,000 and 2,500 nuclear warheads for each country by the end of 2007, Scheinman notes.

But for some former U.S. officials, that ceiling is still too high. “Two thousand warheads aimed at the United States puts us totally out of business, the same as with Russia,” argues retired Adm. Stansfield Turner, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

From a practical standpoint, Turner argues, there is no difference between reducing the present number of warheads each side is allowed to some 3,000 warheads, the START II ceiling, or to 2,000. A more significant difference, he says, would be if both sides could go down to between 700 and 1,000 warheads. (The United States is estimated to have more than 6,000.)

But it is politically difficult to go down that low, because both the U.S. Congress and the Russian Duma are convinced of the need to maintain nuclear capability in the event of even conventional warfare, an attitude Turner calls “silly.” The former CIA director notes that the United States defeated Iraq in 1991 “with one arm tied behind our back,” and doubts that any conventional army is so threatening that it justifies a nuclear response.

Scheinman insists that Washington is “strongly committed to nuclear disarmament and to the goal of the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons.” By the time of the completion of START III, he argues, “the United States will have reduced its total deployed strategic warheads by more than 65 percent of warheads permitted under START I.”

But the administration is far more eager to press on with other issues, including the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Eastern Europe, which may in turn inflame popular sentiment in Russia and create other disarmament snags.

The current Clinton administration proposals to expand NATO’s defence alliance to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have already caused several countries here — notably Belarus and Russia, but also South Africa — to warn that such expansion could serve to increase nuclear defences rather than encourage disarmament, Plesch notes.