DISARMARMENT-US: Clinton Vows to Try Again

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Oct 14 1999 (IPS) - US President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party licked their wounds Thursday after the Republican- dominated Senate refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and vowed they would try again.

“It is still on the Senate calendar,” Clinton declared just hours after the treaty’s 51-48 defeat Wednesday night. “It will not go away; it must not go away…I assure you, the fight is far from over.”

Speaking in Seattle, Vice President Al Gore, the leading Democratic candidate to succeed Clinton as president in next year’s elections, also pledged to fight for the treaty.

“My very first act as President will be to resubmit this treaty to the Senate for ratification,” he said. “We are going to ratify a treaty banning nuclear tests. It is only a matter of time.”

Such defiance notwithstanding, administration supporters and disarmament activists could not hide their bitter disappointment at the Senate vote, which effectively freezes global efforts to bring the treaty, so far signed by 154 nations, into force.

The treaty cannot take effect until it is approved by the 44 nations that have some nuclear infrastructure. Several key nuclear powers, including China and Russia, have indicated they will not act on the treaty until Washington ratifies it.

The Senate rejection will “irreparably damage global efforts to contain the spread of nuclear weapons; undermine, if not end, American leadership of these efforts; and risk the collapse of the treaty regime painstakingly constructed over 50 years by Republican and Democratic leaders,” said Joseph Circincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Wednesday’s vote – the first Senate defeat of a major international treaty since its rejection of the League of Nations after World War I – was a major rebuff not only to Clinton, but also to Washington’s closest European allies.

In an unprecedented plea published last week in the New York Times, the leaders of France, Britain and Germany, all of whom have ratified the treaty, called on the Senate to follow suit.

“Rejection of the treaty in the (US) Senate would remove the pressure from other states still hesitating about whether to ratify it,” declared Premier Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.

“Rejection would give great encouragement to proliferators. Rejection also would expose a fundamental divergence within NATO,” they warned.

The CTBT, signed in 19996, outlaws all nuclear weapons explosions, including those for peaceful purposes and those conducted underground.

Under the treaty, compliance would be monitored by a network of several hundred seismological stations, laboratories, and listening stations around the world to ensure that any treaty violation would be quickly detected.

Treaty supporters argued that the verification system, coupled with Washington’s own spy capabilities, was more than adequate to detect violations.

Even if the United States concluded that other countries were cheating or that its own nuclear stockpile had become unsafe or unreliable, it could itself resume testing after giving six month’s notice of its withdrawal, they pointed out.

Proponents also insisted that the treaty served Washington’s own security interests. By denying other nations the right to test new nuclear weapons, it essentially would “lock in” Washington’s clear superiority in nuclear arms technology for the foreseeable future.

“The CTBT will help limit the development of more advanced and destructive weapons and inhibit the ability of more countries to acquire nuclear weapons,” Gen. Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, told the Senate.

Republicans, however, objected to the treaty on two grounds.

They cited news reports that US intelligence could not monitor low-level nuclear tests by Russia with enough accuracy to ensure compliance. Also “rogue” states – such as Iraq and North Korea – might be able to replicate those tests and build a nuclear-arms capability, according to the republicans.

They also raised concerns about Washington’s ability to maintain the reliability and safety its own nuclear arsenal in the absence of testing.

Government physicists and independent analysts, however, responded that reliability could be assured through computer simulations and non-nuclear explosive tests costing about five billion dollars a year.

These substantive issues appeared to be irrelevant, however, once Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott unexpectedly put a vote on the CTBT on the Senate calendar. The move surprised both the administration and Senate Democrats who had been pressing without success for hearings on the treaty since shortly after Clinton became the first world leader to sign it in September, 1996.

To win ratification, Clinton and the Democrats – who hold only 45 of the Senate’s 100 seats – had to win by a two-thirds vote.

The democrats did win the support of such Republican national- security luminaries as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, as tried to get Lott to shelve the treaty until next year.

Under pressure from far-right senators, including Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms, Lott said he would only agree to this if Clinton pledged not to bring up the CTBT for the rest of his presidency. The president refused.

In the end, the treaty fell 19 votes short of the two-thirds required, with 44 Democrats and four Republicans voting for the treaty.

Some Democrats said, despite its potentially disastrous effect on global disarmament efforts, the outcome could bring them political advantage.

Recent polls have shown overwhelming public backing for the CTBT – as much as 82 percent. In addition, some 32 Nobel laureates for physics publicly supported the treaty.

“We expect this will be an issue in the national elections next year, if this isn’t resolved,” said Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

But others, including treaty supporters, are not so certain that the Democrats can benefit so much, particularly given the prevailing indifference to foreign affairs.

“While Americans are still interested in foreign affairs and think foreign policy is important in choosing a President, there are numerous studies indicating that the way they vote is far more influenced by domestic issues,” according to Steven Kull, director of the Programme on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.