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For Second Year Running, U.S. a No-Show at CTBT Conference
For the second consecutive time, the United States will not send
a delegation to a meeting of states belonging to the 1996 Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which seeks to ban all forms of explosive
nuclear testing. Many member states will meet in Vienna September
3-5 to examine ways to accelerate the treaty’s entry into force.
A U.S. official confirmed July 30 that the United States will not
attend the September meeting. The United States, which has signed
but so far refused to ratify the CTBT, also declined to attend a
November 2001 meeting on speeding the treaty’s entry into force.
The United States did attend a meeting in Vienna October 6-8, 1999,
but several days later, on October 13, the U.S. Senate rejected
the pact.
However, the decade-long unilateral U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing
remains in place, Secretary of State Colin Powell reaffirmed August
7. He said, “The President has no intention of testing nuclear
weapons. We have no need to.” Yet, Powell noted that the United
States—obligated to maintain a safe, reliable stockpile—“can’t
rule it out forever.”
Despite the U.S. absence, organizers intend the meeting’s final
declaration to promote practical measures that over the next several
years will help move the treaty toward enactment. “Now we’re
underlining a perspective for the future,” Ambassador Tom Grönberg
of Finland, chair of the meeting’s preparatory process, told
Arms Control Today July 30. “We have to have a concrete
program” to promote the CTBT’s entry into force.
A Bush administration official noted that, despite the U.S. decision
not to ratify the treaty in the near future, the U.S. commitment
to the International Monitoring System—a global network of
stations that use scientific methods to measure whether seismic
events resulted from nuclear testing—remains strong. Washington
continues to help fund the system, contributing about $18 million
in fiscal year 2003.
Although 104 countries have ratified the CTBT since it opened for
signature in September 1996, it has never entered into force. The
treaty provisions require a set of 44 countries listed as “nuclear
capable” in the CTBT’s Annex II to ratify the treaty before
it can enter into force; only 32 of the required ratifiers have
done so. Algeria submitted its instruments of ratification on July
11, becoming the most recent Annex II country to ratify the treaty,
according to the Preparatory Commission for the CTBT Organization.
China and the United States are among the Annex II countries that
have yet to ratify the pact, and India, Pakistan, and North Korea—also
Annex II countries—have not signed the treaty.
Despite the strong support many CTBT member states expressed for
the treaty at the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty preparatory meeting
in May, the CTBT regime faces substantial new challenges. Recent
tensions over North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs have raised
concerns that Pyongyang might conduct a nuclear test. Experts have
warned that Bush administration hints that the United States might
resume testing could spur the resumption of nuclear testing among
the other states recognized as nuclear powers by the international
nonproliferation regime—China, Russia, the United Kingdom,
and France.
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