Nuclear treaty: giant step back from the brink

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 4, 1996

The human family can breathe another sigh of relief as world leaders line up to sign the nuclear weapons testing treaty that should take the human family another giant step away from the madness of nuclear annihilation.

President Clinton last week signed the U.N. -sponsored treaty that bans all nuclear weapons testing. He called the treaty the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in arms control history."

The next wise step would be a quick Senate ratification.

Since the early years of the nuclear arms race, diplomats have talked about reaching an agreement that would ban all nuclear explosions, underground or above-ground, high-or low-yield, military or civilian. But it was mostly only talk. Higher priorities involved developing weapons to get an edge on adversaries. But they eventually found no end to that costly road - and security was never gained.

The agreement finally came within realistic reach last year when more than 100 countries set a formal target date of late 1996 for completing a comprehensive test-ban treaty.

Last summer, however, after an overwhelming majority of countries had agreed on painstakingly negotiated draft language, India complained that the treaty failed to spell out a timetable for eliminating all nuclear weapons and threatened to hold up its approval indefinitely. India's real concern was to preserve its own freedom to test.

Letting India stall the treaty would have effectively destroyed all diplomatic momentum for agreement.

Rather than allow that, treaty supporters, including the Clinton administration, turned to Australia, a country that has special credibility on nuclear issues with nonaligned and nonnuclear nations as well as the major powers, to save the agreement by bringing it directly to the United Nations. Last month, Canberra, along with more than 120 cosponsors, put the treaty before the General Assembly. The large number of cosponsors, compared with the handful that have joined India in opposition, made the treaty possible.

All rive existing nuclear powers have said they will sign. Once they ratify as well, the voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing that all five are now observing would take on the status of international law.

Regrettably, however, the treaty's international monitoring and inspection system cannot begin operating until India ratifies. Even without this monitoring system, the United States is confident it will be able to detect and publicize any nuclear explosions, using its own intelligence resources.

The treaty will not go into effect for at least two years, and Clinton administration officials say they hope India can be brought around by then.

There is a sour note here at home, however: In a disconcerting bow to anti-internationalist sentiment, the Republican Party platform calls for opposition to the test-ban treaty. The platform repudiates the treaty as "inconsistent with American security interests" and argues that the United States, in order to deter the threat of weapons of mass destruction from rogue states, will "require the continuing maintenance and development of nuclear weapons and other periodic testing."

That's just a continuation of the madness.