'U.S. ratification of CTBT may be delayed'

By George Chakko

VIENNA, APRIL 30. The former CTBT chief moderator at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in 1996 and current Chairman of the CTBT Preparatory Commission (PrepCom), Mr. Jaap Raamaker, has said that the Bush administration in the U.S. has initiated a thorough review of its defence policy and any Senate decision on CTBT ratification can only be expected after that, and this could take many months.

Mr. Raamaker and Dr. Wolfgang Hoffmann, CTBTO Executive Secretary, had returned from the U.S. after attending the annual International Arms Control Conference of over 300 experts from 36 countries at Albuquerque.

Explaining the current go-slow, low key U.S. position, Mr. Raamaker said, ``When the U.S. Senators had to vote for this treaty, 62 Senators of whom 26 were Republicans had asked for more time to consider this treaty. Many thought this was not the way to go about a multilateral treaty like this''. Questioned on the attitude of people like Senator Jesse Helms in bringing forth unrelated matters as excuses not to ratify, the opinion power of experts in weapon labs like Los Alamos and Lawrence Rivermore and the European view of it, Mr. Raamaker said, ``I am speaking in my personal capacity. One shouldn't see it too dramatically. All these issues are under review in the U.S. which also means there are different viewpoints within the administration. You have, of course, new people coming in the new administration, from different sides, from think tanks, who in our European terms have been serving the Republican Opposition in Clinton years. But in the end, there will be a balanced view of things. CTBT and missile defence I don't see an actual factual relationship. The U.S. has gone public to maintain moratorium on testing. Actually, when the Senate debate took place on this treaty in a far too short period of time, there were mainly two areas where the Senators were concerned that were complicated enough as they called it; one was verification and the other, guarantee of the safety, security and reliability of their nuclear stockpile once the treaty has entered into force. There are all sorts of answers to this. Verifiability is a question of how far, how much. If you want to be 100 per cent sure, you can't say that of any international treaty, you have to get into a process of negotiations. However, if you want to have a reasonable, high confidence in clandestine tests being discovered, this treaty is O.K. It also deters violators from clandestine tests. On the sidelines there are countries which intend to do test weapons, they don't want to be clandestine. They want the whole world to see that they can do it, as is the case with India and Pakistan. So, the question reliability is a matter of definition and in the end, the stronger point is the question of deterrence. In fact, the technology of verification has improved enormously since the negotiations on the treaty ended. In those five years, tremendous progress has been made on verification by the same national labs you mentioned.''

On the Los Alamos weapons' director, Dr. Steve Younger's views, Mr. Raamaker was acidic, ``He is one of last weapon designers Los Alamos has. The problem of aging of nuclear weapons stored is also the problem of aging of weapon designers. It has actually been about 10 or 12 that those P.2 people have not been active. They are all going into retirement. I think we should not forget that the Cold War is over. In the point of view of scientists, the golden age of nuclear testing is over. So, they are looking into different things; the younger ones are going into other activities and the older ones are retired. I am still hopeful that we have seen the end of Cold War.''

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Section  : International
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