Project for the New American Century

October 7, 1999

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

As things now stand, the Senate is likely to vote next week on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an accord which prohibits all nuclear weapons tests and sets up a world-wide system for monitoring compliance. If the Senate votes and rejects the treaty, it will not be, as the administration says, a "rush to judgement." Whatever the political problems associated with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's decision to schedule a Senate vote on the treaty, the arguments for and against the treaty are well known. Further Senate deliberation or additional sets of hearings will not elicit any new wisdom about the CTBT's merits.

Unless the president formally requests the treaty be withdrawn from consideration, the Senate should go ahead and vote, and it should vote against the treaty’s ratification. The nation’s future security will rest, as it does today, on American military preeminence -- conventional and nuclear. U.S. nuclear supremacy is nothing to be ashamed of. Instead, it's something to be preserved and extended, and not constrained by a treaty of dubious value.

The treaty's supporters argue that a ban would freeze the nuclear arms race, prevent the spread of such weapons, and rekindle the prospects for nuclear disarmament. But the CTBT will accomplish none of these goals. Designs for reliable, first-generation nuclear weapons are readily available and well understood. Today, states like Pakistan and North Korea can become nuclear powers without testing. Nor is the means to verify compliance with the CTBT adequate to preclude the kind of covert, low-yield testing required for existing nuclear states to tailor and improve existing arsenals. In short, like so many other arms control efforts before it, the CTBT's promise rests more on hope than cold reality.

The administration has argued that these possible flaws in the treaty are not fatal because the United States will maintain the safety and reliability of its nuclear deterrent once a system of computer-simulated testing (the Stockpile Stewardship Program) is in place. However, like the treaty, this program is as much a matter of faith as scientific reality: the program doesn't exist now; it will not exist for at least a decade; it will only exist then if funded to the tune of $50 billion; and, when in place, it will be of speculative utility in the absence of actual weapons tests to gauge its own performance. It is irresponsible to pretend that we can have a nuclear arsenal that is safe and reliable absent testing.

Ratifying the CTBT would inevitably lead to an erosion in the credibility of America's nuclear deterrent in the decades ahead. In its place we will be putting our hopes in a new multilateral arms control regime, consisting of some 150 states, whose interest will be to preserve the “disarmament process” at all costs. If the history of similar efforts is any guide, the new bureaucracy established by the CTBT will generally turn a blind eye to violations, appease those it can’t ignore and, on the whole, give minimal credence to the special role of the U.S. nuclear deterrent in helping keep peace globally. A one-size-fits-all arms control treaty is an open invitation for ambitious states to take advantage of the good faith of other nations and, in turn, hamstring American leadership by supporting new disarmament initiatives put forward by the world's Lilliputians.

Now it may be that the testing moratorium being adhered to by the United States should remain in place until a new and more serious administration takes office and sorts out what kind of threats we will likely face in the future and what kind of weapons will be needed to meet them. But that is far different policy position than one which would ban testing permanently.

The Senate should vote next week and it should reject the test-ban treaty. As we head into the new century, it would send a refreshingly sound strategic message to the nation and our allies in the world: to wit, American security should rest on American principles backed by American power, and not the tired promises of yet another arms control measure.