DISARMAMENT: Treaty Targets Argentina, Brazil and Chile

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 4 1998 (IPS) - The preparatory commission of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) has launched an offensive to get the treaty ratified by Argentina, Brazil and Chile, the three Latin American countries with the greatest number of monitoring stations.

Wolfgang Hoffmann, the executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission for the CTBT Organisation, reached Brazil Monday, where he will meet with diplomats, legislators and top-level government officials before heading on to Argentina and Chile.

Argentina, Brazil and Chile signed the CTBT on Sep. 24, 1996, the day it was opened up to signing at the United Nations’ New York headquarters. But none of the three have yet ratified the treaty, even though the foreign ministries of the three countries share the aims of the treaty which prohibits “the carrying out of any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.”

In Latin America and the Caribbean, Peru is the only country that has ratified the treaty. The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Guyana, St. Kitts-Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam and Trinidad and Tobago have not yet signed.

The treaty will go into effect as soon as it is ratified by 44 countries on a list based on the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency’s statistics on nuclear reactors. The only Latin American countries on the list are Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru.

The CTBT was the fruit of more than 20 long years of discussions in the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and other international fora.

The world’s five declared nuclear powers – the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain – have all signed the treaty, but only France and Britain have ratified it.

And of the three countries on the “nuclear threshold,” India, Pakistan and Israel, which have not publicly admitted that they possess nuclear weapons, only Israel has signed the treaty.

India is staunchly opposed to the treaty, arguing that rather than working towards the total elimination of nuclear weapons, it only consolidates the nuclear monopoly enjoyed by five nations.

Anti-war organisations, meanwhile, which overwhelmingly support the treaty, object that it fails to provide for a ban on other forms of nuclear testing.

Jacqueline Cabasso, with the Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, California, said last week that “in the U.S., nuclear weapons design will be advanced through simulations carried out using superfast computers costing hundreds of millions of dollars, coupled with archived data from more than 1000 past tests, and new diagnostic information” obtained from a number of procedures, including “subcritical ‘zero yield’ underground tests.

“Several of the declared nuclear weapons states have similar programmes, and a high level of cooperation is taking place among them,” she told last week’s meeting of the preparatory committee of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in Geneva.

India’s opposition will continue to keep the treaty from going into effect, because the new government installed in March in New Delhi has left open the possibility of building nuclear weapons.

At the first CTBT review conference, in 1999, the rest of the party states will seek to change the requisites for the treaty to go into effect.

In the 1980s, Argentina and Brazil announced that they had suspended research into nuclear weapons, and signed – along with Chile – the Tlatelolco Treaty which declares Latin America an area free of nuclear arms.

Hoffmann’s specific interest in the three countries is based on the existence of 23 monitoring stations capable of detecting nuclear explosions that violate the CTBT.

The treaty has a protocol under which an International Monitoring System (IMS) and an International Data Centre (IDC) are being established as part of the global verification regime.

IMS will consist of a global network of 321 monitoring stations, as well as 16 laboratories, capable of detecting nuclear explosions worldwide. This network of 170 seismic, 80 radionuclide, 60 infrasound and 11 hydroacustic stations, as well as the 16 radionuclide laboratories – comprising a total of 337 facilities – will supply the IDC with data for processing and analysis.

Argentina has eight stations and one laboratory, Brazil six stations and a laboratory, and Chile seven stations.

Sources with the Vienna-based Preparatory Commission for the CTBT said Hoffmann was confident that ratification by Argentina, Brazil and Chile would push other developing nations to follow their lead.

Some countries have failed to sign the treaty simply due to unfamiliarity with the text or because of a lack of technical background, as in the case of Guatemala, they pointed out.

The treaty has so far been signed by 149 countries, and ratified by 13: Austria, Czech Republic, Fiji, France, Japan, Micronesia (Federated States of), Mongolia, Peru, Qatar, Slovakia, Turkmenistan, United Kingdom of Great Britain and North Ireland and Uzbekistan. But only six of the 44 nations that must ratify the treaty in order for it to go into force have done so.