Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)

President Eisenhower said that not achieving 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.''

That was in 1961.

The CTBT was concluded in 1996 after 40 years of bipartisan effort. The United States was the first to sign. President Clinton called it ''the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in the history of arms control.''

We join many others in the belief that ratification of this treaty is the most important vote that the US Senate will ever make in our lifetime. On October 13, 1999, it was rejected after only 3 days of debate by a vote that, with few exceptions, was totally along party lines. All but four Senate Republicans voted against ratification, despite the fact that this is a completely non-partisan issue and is supported by 80% of Republicans.

We think the Senate rejection of the CTBT was a national embarrassment.

“This is the most serious mistake the Senate ever made,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del.

Indeed, the rest of the world agrees with Biden. Among officials at NATO and the United Nations, there were expressions of regret, often combined with fears that the U.S. vote had dealt what Philippine Foreign Secretary Domingo Siazon called “an enormous blow to all our efforts to make the world a safer place to live in.”

YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE...here's how:

The view of the President has an enormous impact on whether we will ratify the treaty in the near future. And the leading candidates for President disagree on whether this treaty should be ratified. Each side argues that their view will reduce risk for the US. Obviously, they can't both be right.

AGAINST RATIFICATION: Bush

FOR RATIFICATION: Bradley, Gore

Who is right? We encourage you to make up your own mind about this critical issue. Here are five really simple things that YOU can do to help save the world:

• Get informed. Reading the information below is a good start.
• Decide how important you think this issue is to you, and how much you feel this issue should affect your decision on who you will support for the Senate and for President
• Make a campaign CONTRIBUTION to the candidates you support
• VOTE for the candidates you support
• ENCOURAGE your friends to do the same thing you did

Here's some quick background...a column that appeared in the Washington Post by syndicated columnist Geneva Overholser before the Senate vote. Unfortunately, the Senate did not vote as she expected and the treaty was not ratified.

SENATORS RECKLESS IN HOLDING UP TREATY
NUCLEAR TEST BAN IS IN COUNTRY'S INTERESTS

MY E-MAIL TO TOM CAMPBELL

I sent the following email recently to Tom Campbell who is running for Senate. Campbell is presently against ratification and his reasons are very similar to the reasons that Presidential candidate Bush articulated to me recently as to why he is against the treaty. So the arguments below apply to Campbell as well as to Bush:

Tom,

This paper [Cato Institute's analysis of the CTBT] largely misses the point on verification. One hundred percent certainty is not the goal. The goal of any verification system is to deter all violations of the treaty, while assuring detection of violations that would deprive a party of the security benefits it derives from the compliance of the other parties. Thus the probability of detecting violations must be high enough so that potential violators will believe that the risks of being found in violation outweigh the expected benefits of the illegal act. Conversely, the law-abiding nations must be convinced that the security risks posed any by undetected violations are substantially less than the security benefits of the treaty.

The facts suggest otherwise on both counts (verification and risk). I realize you are using the Defense Secretaries as examples of smart people who support your position, but there are even more smart people who support ratification. Shouldn't you trust a US President's judgement more than a Defense Secretary? Or the judgement of those whose job it is to be the primary military advisor to those Defense Secretaries (namely, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff). The treaty is supported by current and former US Presidents, important military officials like the last two former Commander in Chiefs of the Strategic Air Command (Habiger and Butler), the Department of Defense, Gen. Colin Powell, current and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (including General John Shalikashvili) , 82% of the American public and the 154 nations who have already signed including Russia, UK, France, and China.  And how about the 15 of 19 NATO nations that have already ratified? Are most of our NATO nations wrong in ratifying a treaty that is so clearly in our favor?  The treaty also has the support of  former Senators such as Republicans Nancy Kassebaum (KS) and John Danforth (MO), and Paul Nitze who was an arms control negotiator for Reagan.

Fortunately for us, China and Russia continue to express their intention to ratify (Jiang Zemin in a recent meeting with French Pres. Chirac reiterated that China intended to ratify), and Foreign Minister Ivanov recently said that they will ask the Russian Duma to ratify. Whether they will remains to be seen.

The US has a substantial lead in nuclear weapons technology and we haven't needed to test since 1992. This treaty, therefore, is strongly in our favor.Yet we rejected it?! That makes no sense to me. It should be totally clear to everyone that if ANY country should reject this treaty, we should be the LAST country to reject it!

EQUAL TIME

The ABC News website has statements from experts arguing each side of the CTBT issue. They can't both be right. Armed with the knowledge you now have, you decide:

• Who is right? Senate Republicans and four former Defense Secretaries? Or Senate Democrats, four Senate Republicans, current and former US Presidents, two former Commander in Chiefs of the Strategic Air Command, the Department of Defense, Gen. Colin Powell, current and former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (which is a really important point since the chairman of the JCS is the principal military advisor to the Defense Secretary), 82% of the American public, 154 nations including 15 of 19 NATO nations, and the rest of the world?
• Do you feel safer at night knowing that the US and other countries are now free to develop more nuclear weapons?

You may also want to read the emails I've received about the CTBT.

ARGUMENTS FOR RATIFICATION

From Naila Bolus and Paul Carroll of Ploughshares

We have come up with the following responses to the various points, questions, issues raised. Also I want to note that we refer primarily to those organizations we fund (as well as our scientific advisors) - they are the experts on the technical aspects of the treaty and the testing issue generally. And I'm sure any of them would be happy to talk with you in detail about any of these issues.

Again, I apologize for taking so long to get back to you, but I wanted to provide a thorough response. Hope this helps.

I. Safety and Reliability of the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal

Much of the debate and concern about the CTBT centers on the nuclear arsenal "turning to green cheese" over time if we do not constantly update, improve, and test it. These issues are complex, but there are some key points to be made.

1) The definitions of "safety" and "reliability" are very different and distinct, despite the fact that DOE tends to use them together ("safe and reliable"). There is a very technical definition for safety, having to do with the probability of a warhead detonating with a nuclear yield if subjected to certain adverse conditions. Basically, a "safe" warhead is one that will not explode even if subjected to fire, crash, theft, etc. The standard is high, on the order of less than one chance in a million. All current U.S. warheads are certified as "safe" and the passage of time will have little to do with any changes to safety. Safety is a function of the design of the weapon and its integration into the overall weapon system. In fact, DOE's own data show that "no age-related safety issue has ever occurred in the nuclear component of a nuclear weapon." (This is from a report about the Stockpile Stewardship program by Ploughshares Fund grantee Tri-Valley CAREs of Livermore, California.)

"Reliability" on the other hand, is the assurance that a warhead will explode within a relatively close range to its design yield. In other words, if a warhead is designed and intended to explode with a yield of 300 kilotons (roughly 20 Hiroshimas, a typical U.S. warhead) and it explodes with only 270 kilotons, it is deemed unreliable (only a 90% yield performance). Reliability, it is feared, will deteriorate over time as materials decay and warheads age.

These fears have slightly more merit than those about safety. But "aging" is rarely a significant problem with respect to reliability, either. (A report by another Ploughshares Fund grantee, the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) called "Nuclear Safety Smokescreen" found that "Most reliability problems have a minor effect: almost seventy percent [of defects] reduced reliability by only one percent or less. The majority of reliability problems do not need corrective action or can be solved through production changes.")

Thus, the question for reliability is really one of "how reliable is reliable enough?" Congressman Campbell raises this issue in his correspondence of Monday, November 15 when he cites Dr. Robert Barker discussing the issue. Barker talks about those who would argue that "it doesn't matter if the reliability is only 65 percent". Based on the historical record, those few reliability problems that were discovered after the production of a warhead model, it is clear that negative impacts to reliability were far less than this arbitrary number. Furthermore, they had nothing to do with aging.

2) The vast majority of U.S. nuclear tests over the last 50 years were carried out for design proof testing and not for testing safety once a warhead model was in production. Using the automobile analogy that many, including Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs at DOE, Vic Reis, use, the nuclear tests are done on prototypes to test design concepts and performance. The designers use the information to refine the weapons. Once a design is "in production" it has been tested upside down and sideways to ensure that it is both safe and reliable. As thorough study of DOE data has shown in a study by the IEER, those warhead problems over the past decades that were severe enough to require "major modifications" were inherent in the design of the warhead, NOT due to aging. Thus, the "lemon" analogy falls down since it is the design of the car that went into production that was at fault, not time past since the consumer bought the car. The point here is that we need to be clear on what all those tests were actually carried out to do. Very few were for "checking" on the reliability or safety of warheads already produced and deployed. Most were for proof of design concept and actual nuclear weapons effects testing for military planning purposes.

II. Verification

There have been many good points made and questions asked by Bill Krause, Ed McIntosh, and Congressman Campbell about the verification regime in the current CTBT.

It is important to understand some basic facts about developing nuclear weapons and who the CTBT is aimed at. Bill Krause points out that "it is absolutely possible to build nuclear weapons and test them without detection consistently." We would not agree with this completely. There is an important distinction to be made between fledgling nuclear aspirants, and established nuclear powers.

The United States, in 1945, never tested the type of bomb it dropped on Hiroshima. This was a "gun type" atomic weapon that used two parts of uranium-235 and drove them together to produce the blast. The scientists and engineers knew it would work based on solid understanding of the relatively straightforward physics, and the test pile at the University of Chicago. We did test the plutonium bomb, like "Fat Man", that was used on Nagasaki because it was a more complex implosion device. This first ever nuclear explosion at Trinity in July of 1945 had about a 12 kiloton yield.

We need to be clear about what the CTBT can and cannot do, and what it can achieve even with limitations. There are today at least 9 assured nuclear states. The traditional 5 (U.S., Russia, China, France, and Great Britain) are mature and have long experience with nuclear weapons. We would argue that for these states, the CTBT would act as an arresting hook to stop "vertical proliferation" - the continued improvement and advancement of nuclear weapons technology.

For the others (India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa), and nuclear aspirants, their state of maturity is far less. The tests in May of 1998 in India and Pakistan were readily detected and identified by international seismic means not part of any proliferation regime. Like the U.S. experience, the "infancy" stage tests were around the 10 kiloton range.

Back to Bill Krause's assertion (through Gen. Goodpastor) that it is possible to hide nuclear tests consistently. Yes, a mature nuclear state with the capability to "decouple" a nuclear test and conduct tests in the low-yield range around 1 kiloton could escape detection. But why would they want to? Russia (or the U.S., or China) would have nothing to gain from carrying out clandestine tests in the 1 kiloton yield range.

There is excellent information available about seismic testing and the CTBT verification regime available at http://earth.agu.org/revgeophys/vander00/node4.html. This is written by Gregory van der Vink, and expert on seismic verification issues. He notes that in the 1980s "the range for the verification limit was between 1 and 10 kilotons [ Sykes, 1982; Hannon, 1985; Evernden et al., 1986], with a general conservative consensus of around 5 kilotons [ U.S. Congress, 1988]." "For an explosion of ten kilotons or more, decoupling would not be a credible evasion scenario." He continues: Without decoupling, a 1 kiloton nuclear explosion creates a seismic signal of M 4.0. There are about 7,500 seismic events worldwide each year with M 4.0 (Figure 1). At this magnitude, all such events in continental regions could be detected and identified with current or planned networks. If, however, a country were able to decouple successfully a 1 kiloton explosion in a large underground cavity, the muffled seismic signal generated by the explosion might be equivalent to 0.015 kilotons and have a seismic magnitude of M 2.5.

A threshold nuclear state would have to make several leaps beyond what every other nuclear weapons state went through to succeed in such evasion. Not a likely scenario. Furthermore, in today's world, it is far more likely that such a state or group would simply seek to buy a weapon rather than undertake the formidable enterprise of producing fissile materials, designing a weapon, excavating a test site to "decouple" the explosion, and test the bomb. It should be noted that these other steps would likely be detected by other means such as satellites, radiological detection, and even human intelligence. There is a good discussion of the range of the verification system under the CTBT at http://www.clw.org/coalition/briefv3n14.htm.

It would be remarkable indeed if a brand new or "threshold" nuclear state or actor were to kickoff its nuclear birth with a 1 kiloton range test. These are the levels of tests that might easily "fall below the radar" of seismic verification. But these are only tests that mature nuclear states could carry out. Furthermore, tests in this range are likely to yield only information of use to advanced, thermonuclear capable states. Ray Kidder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is an authority on nuclear testing, safety and reliability, and what various tests and their magnitudes can and cannot do. We defer to him for a fuller discussion on who can gain what knowledge from what kinds of test, let alone actually carry them out. (Also see the article by Hans Bethe in the New York Review of books I referred you to before; it's on Ploughshares Fund's website now.)

III. Other Issues

Ed McIntosh stated that "we may be out to do a lot more nuclear testing in the near future" as part of the potential decision to deploy a National Missile Defense (NMD) system. This is inaccurate. While the far-flung Star Wars program of the 1980s foresaw a number of different kill mechanisms that would destroy incoming missiles in the boost phase and post-boost phase, and re-entry phase, the currently planned NMD is strictly a "kinetic kill" system. Star Wars did have provisions for using nukes to kill nukes. NMD is a more pure "hit a bullet with a bullet" system, and the defending bullet is decidedly non-nuclear.

Bill Krause writes that "another severe limitation has to do with the fact that the current CTBT is forever binding with no outs." This is not accurate. The United States demanded several "safeguards" as part of its treaty ratification position. Most of these have to do with the DOE's massive Stockpile Stewardship program, another whole topic of conversation. However, these so-called "safeguards" and the treaty itself allow for parties to withdraw under a clause of "supreme national interest." The safeguards can be found on the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers site at http://www.clw.org/coalition/whsafeg.htm.

As to your point about testing "detonators", there are three distinct parts, to oversimplify, of modern thermonuclear weapons. 1) a chemical high explosive that implodes the plutonium "primary", also called a "trigger" 2) the primary that results in a fission explosion and sometimes a "boosted fission" explosion and 3) the fusion "secondary" that gives today's weapons most of their explosive power.

A note on "triggers" and deterioration. While it is true that we don't know with certainty what will happen to warheads say, 100 years from now, we do know a lot about the special nuclear materials in them. Plutonium, the key element in the "trigger" or primary, has a half-life of 24,400 years. Doubtful much will happen in the way of deterioration over even 100 years. The secondary, or the "H" part of today's H-bombs, is mostly uranium-238 with a half life of about 400 million years. Also, as the IEER report points out, the nuclear components are the most solid state and robust parts of today's weapons. The non-nuclear components are more likely to experience age-related problems. These components can be fully tested in a non-nuclear manner, and in fact are tested under the DOE's Stockpile Surveillance and Maintenance Program.

A final word. As you (and we have argued), with any arms control treaty the ultimate measure of its worthiness is a cost/benefit one. Will the CTBT's benefits outweigh the costs from possible cheating? We would argue yes, since the verification regime can continue to improve, since cheaters are extremely likely to be "caught", and since the CTBT does have powerful symbolic impact as well as real world affect in arresting the advancement of nuclear weapons technology and the proliferation of more rudimentary capabilities. No treaty will ever deter a party that is un-deterrable, just as no amount of nuclear weapons will prevent a terrorist attack. This is an unrealistic standard to set. But the international norms that can be achieved by the CTBT can go a great distance toward global stability in the nuclear weapons realm.    

Q: Can you test the detonators without doing a nuclear test?   e.g., to find out whether the electronics still functions?  Campbell's argument is that if we don't know if the ICs still work, the  weapon may not fire. And we can't just replace the electronics in 10 years  because the components of the original may not be manufactured anymore. So is it possible to test a detonator without a nuclear explosion?  

As I understand your question, the answer is yes. Our grantees have pointed out that under the Stockpile Suveillance program warheads of each type are annually withdrawn from the stockpile, dissasembled and inspected - visual inspection for signs of corrosion or deterioration of materials, plus electronic and mechanical checking of components. We can use non-nuclear testing methods even for the high explosives next to the pits. DOE documents show that the majority of aging effects occur in the testable and more easily replaced non-nuclear components.

Also, test ban opponents claim that the original materials in warheads, such as some plastics and adhesives, might not be available in the future. While this might be a minor problem in the future, our grantees and experts (such as Ray Kidder) argue that in reality replacement materials need not be exactly the same as the originals; they need only to perform the same functions, within established tolerances for error. That perfomance can be evaluated under stockpile surveillance and occasionally full-scale dynamic testing short of nuclear detonation.

FINAL WORDS

Here are some final words to think about from four-star General George Lee Butler, a career military officer and a classic cold warrior, who commanded the U.S. Strategic Command from 1991-1994. He is among the very few whose job description has included the power to destroy the planet. He has a unique insight into the issues and scenarios surrounding nuclear war. He supervised the huge and complex system that exists solely to prepare to launch a massive nuclear strike. He was confronted daily with the irrationality of that system. "The capacity for human error, human failure, mechanical failure and misunderstanding was virtually infinite…We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention."

So are you feeling lucky today? Or will you help make a difference by helping to elect the right President and Senators through voting and talking to your friends?

For more information
CTBT viewpoints on the Ploughshares website
E-mails I've received about the CTBT
Reforming politics

Links
Steve Kirsch home page
Kirsch charitable giving home page