The Losers Will Be the Human Race

The Senate Republican leadership has been given to some stupidly partisan maneuvers, but threatening to kill the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty takes the cake. The only beneficiaries of this unraveling of a treaty signed by President Clinton and 153 other heads of state will be those who seek to terrorize the world with nuclear weapons. The loser will be the human race.

Without a test ban treaty, there is no hope of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which dramatically threatens the future existence of life on this planet. If the CTBT fails, so too does the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which 185 nations have signed but which is contingent on a test ban.

What is at issue is the essential wisdom, enunciated 40 years ago by Dwight Eisenhower, that the proliferation of nuclear weapons represents the gravest threat to our national security. Another Republican president, George Bush, unilaterally ordered a moratorium on testing in 1992 that has held to the present day.

It is only partisan pique with this president that led Sens. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and company to reject a clearly verifiable treaty that pressures other nations to follow Bush’s lead and also abstain from testing. This treaty provides the most extensive seismic and satellite surveillance as well as intrusive on-site inspection of any nation suspected of cheating. It’s backed with a clause that would allow us to pull out and resume testing at the first sign of such a betrayal.

As Madeleine Albright, our hawkish secretary of state, put it: “We don’t need explosive testing. Only would-be proliferators, rogue states and terrorist groups do. And there is no good reason to let them have it.”

But to follow the non-debate in the Senate, where Majority Leader Lott has roundly condemned the treaty without permitting hearings on its merits, one is cast into a surreal world where nuclear bombs are treated as ordinary weapons.

“Do the American people want us to have nuclear arms that are not tested, that are not safe? I don’t think so,” Lott pontificates, with the ignorant aplomb of one who seems unaware that the very notion of a “safe” nuclear weapon is an oxymoron. We are talking “city busters” here, bombs that destroy millions with a single shot. The U.S. possesses 12,000 nuclear weapons of strengths that mock the explosive power that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anything more than a dozen such weapons would guarantee the infliction of total mayhem as a U.S. retaliation to any nation that dares launch a first strike against us. Over the decades, through a thousand tests of the nuclear weapons stockpile, our experts have established that even the oldest of these weapons would have over a 99% reliability rate without ever undergoing additional explosive testing. Surely we can rest easy that this country stands strong in its ability, if there is never another nuclear test, to make the world unlivable for anything but those mutant cockroaches that nuclear weapons experts predict would inherit the post-nuclear war world.

A test ban agreement would lock in U.S. superiority and make it impossible for any other nation to ever presume in the slightest to jeopardize our retaliatory threat. Even the wildly alarmist Cox committee report on Chinese spying concedes China would need to test to develop a credible nuclear arsenal. China has not exploded a nuclear device since signing the test ban treaty in 1996.

Just why do the Republican leaders of the U.S. Senate now want to send China the message that the testing of nuclear weapons is a good thing? Or India and Pakistan, who are flirting with a dangerous nuclear arms race, when both nations have said they would abide by a CTBT?

Were it not for partisanship blinded by animosity toward Clinton, most Senate Republicans would endorse the treaty as an ironclad agreement that leaves the U.S., with its embarrassment of nuclear weapons richness, in the catbird seat.

As the leaders of France, Germany and England jointly stated: “The United States and its allies have worked side by side for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty since the days of President Eisenhower. This goal is now within our grasp. Our security is involved, as well as America’s. For the security of the world we will leave our children, we urge the United States Senate to ratify this treaty.”

It has been four decades since Eisenhower warned that failure to achieve a nuclear test ban “would have to be classed as the greatest disappointment of any administration--of any decade--of any time, and of any party.” Now is the time for voters to get that message through to Trent Lott.