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| Nuclear test-ban treaty chief: US must ratify pact |
| 2009-04-07 |
| Senate opponents of the nuclear test-ban treaty face "a new ballgame" 10 years after they rejected the global pact, the treaty's chief said Tuesday. If the U.S. and other key nations fail again to ratify the pact, the world will become a place with "more fissile material in more facilities with more people to handle it, representing a risk of (nuclear) terrorism," said Tibor Toth, executive secretary of the treaty's preparatory commission. "Probably what you will have to do is revisit the benefits of the treaty from a wider perspective, from a post-2001 viewpoint," Toth told The Associated Press. The Hungarian diplomat was in Washington to meet with Senate staff and take part in a conference on nuclear nonproliferation organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The conference was dominated by talk of President Barack Obama's speech Sunday in Prague, Czech Republic, laying out plans to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. Obama said he aimed to "immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," or CTBT. Although a 1963 treaty bans nuclear tests in the atmosphere, oceans and space, the CTBT would ban all nuclear weapons tests everywhere, including underground, both as a step toward disarmament and to block weapons proliferation. In 1999, the Republican-controlled Senate rejected the pact almost entirely along party lines with a 48-in-favor, 51-against vote. Approval requires a two-thirds majority. Opponents objected to the treaty's monitoring system being unable to detect a cheater's small underground nuclear test, and that the soundness of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would come under question if tests could not be conducted. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, said March 27 he has begun the process of bringing the treaty back before the Senate. Appearing on Tuesday's conference panel with Toth, physicist Sidney Drell, a longtime U.S. government adviser on nuclear weapons issues, noted that the government's weapons laboratories have since determined that the weapons' plutonium "pits" have a lifetime, "conservatively," of 85 to 100 years. "That concern, having weapons more than 20 years old, has been removed in the past 10 years," Drell said. As for verification, Toth pointed out that his organization's monitoring system detected North Korea's very small nuclear test in 2006, and has since strengthened its capabilities. "No test of military significance can go undetected," the treaty chief said. Meanwhile, "on the proliferation side, it is a totally new ballgame. There is a terrorist nexus," Toth told the AP. Treaty proponents point to fears that Pakistan's developing nuclear arsenal might fall into extremist hands in an increasingly unstable nation. Pakistan and the U.S. are two of nine nations whose ratification is still required for the test-ban treaty to take effect. The others are China, North Korea, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran and Israel. Proponents believe a U.S. ratification could lead to these other "dominos" falling into line. Otherwise, a total of 180 nations have signed the treaty and 148 have ratified it, including nuclear weapons powers Russia, Britain and France. |
| Posted by:john frum |
| #3 The CTBT has nothing to do with the security of Pakistan's arsenal or lack thereof. If Pakistan were to sign it, it would simply not test weapons anymore. This would not affect weapons falling into the hands of jihadi elements of the Pak military. |
| Posted by: john frum 2009-04-07 19:32 |
| #2 Treaty proponents point to fears that Pakistan's developing nuclear arsenal might fall into extremist hands in an increasingly unstable nation. And the treaty will be respected by extremists? |
| Posted by: Darrell 2009-04-07 19:16 |
| #1 "must" huh? |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-04-07 18:55 |