Abstract
When president clinton became the first world leader to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) on September 24, 1996, he hailed the agreement as the “longest sought, hardest fought prize in arms control history.” Ironically, having achieved half a victory, Clinton essentially abandoned the fight, allowing a host of personal and political issues to vie for his attention until it was too late to save the treaty. On October 13, the Senate rejected it, 51 to 48, with one member—Democrat Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia—voting “present.” The treaty needed a two-thirds vote of the Senate for ratification.
Although the president and Senate Democrats blame the defeat on an ideologically driven near-party line vote, the blame runs deeper and wider. For starters, the president and his national security team said repeatedly (including in two State of the Union addresses) that the treaty was their number one foreign policy priority. But the administration barely lifted a finger to secure its ratification. Vice President Al Gore's proclamation in his first campaign commercial (hurriedly taped in the aftermath of the vote), that “there is no more important challenge than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons,” rings hollow.
Why didn't the president, the vice president, and his entire national security team back up their rhetoric with action? Why did the administration fail to anticipate that a Republican-controlled Senate that was showing greater and greater antipathy toward the president would mount an effort to defeat the treaty? The administration certainly had experience winning over skeptical senators, gained during the successful ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the effort to expand NATO. In the latter instance, for example, the administration crafted a coordinated, long-term strategy (it laid the groundwork for the NATO vote a year in advance), skillfully deployed cabinet officials to lobby swing votes, and expended the necessary political capital to achieve victory.
By contrast, only in the week or so before the CTBT vote did Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Defense Secretary William Cohen visit Capitol Hill to push for ratification. On the day of the vote itself, both were at an event at the University of Maine. By then, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Even so, it speaks volumes about the administration's priorities.
Setting the stage
When the president submitted the CTBT for ratification in September 1997, North Carolina's Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made it clear that he had no intention of bringing the treaty before his committee until two other agreements—one negotiated with Russia in 1996 that would allow the deployment of limited missile defenses under the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the other, negotiated in 1997, concerning global climate change—were first submitted for ratification. Knowing Helms's antipathy toward both treaties, the Clinton administration responded by refusing to submit the agreements. The CTBT thus became a political hostage. By using his considerable power to block consideration, Helms tied the treaty's fate more to politics than security. The administration, by refusing to handle the treaties on his terms and by failing to mount an aggressive public campaign for ratification of the CTBT, played into his hands.
Sen. Joseph Biden after the vote: He had argued for a showdown.
By the spring and summer of 1999, Senate Democrats were growing increasingly frustrated with Helms's tactics. Non-governmental organizations in the United States and elsewhere that had worked hard to help create the treaty were also concerned about its global prospects if the United States did not ratify soon. Beginning in June and continuing into early September, Democrat Byron Dorgan of North Dakota made at least six speeches on the floor of the Senate extolling the virtues of the treaty, castigating Republicans for refusing to schedule hearings and a debate, and urging his colleagues to help schedule a vote within the next several months.
On June 28, Dorgan and four other senators—Republicans James Jeffords of Vermont and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, and Democrats Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Patty Murray of Washington—wrote to Helms urging him “to hold hearings on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and to report it to the Senate for debate … with sufficient time to allow the United States to actively participate in the Treaty's inaugural conference of Ratifying States, which may be held as early as this September, should the Senate ratify the Treaty.”
During a July 20 appearance in the Rose Garden, President Clinton stood with nine senators (seven Democrats and two Republicans) and called on the Senate to take action. Clinton argued, somewhat disingenuously, that Helms's tactic of holding the treaty “hostage to two matters that are literally not ripe for presentation to the Senate yet would be a grave error.”
On the same day, at a news conference on Capitol Hill, Joseph Biden of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, took a harsher line, saying that the Senate's delay was “counterintuitive; it is irresponsible and it is stupid.” Added Dor-gan, “There is nothing on the Senate agenda—nothing, in my opinion, that is more important than this.”
Also that day, all 45 Senate Democrats sent a letter to Helms asking him to “hold hearings” on the treaty and “report it to the full Senate for debate.” Helms's linguistically exotic reply six days later left little doubt that he was enjoying his role as spoiler: “I note your distress at my floccinaucini-hilipilification of the CTBT,” he wrote. “I do not share your enthusiasm for this treaty for a variety of reasons.”
The contempt factor
In any other year, or with any other president, the impasse might have been resolved more swiftly and amicably. But since the day he took office— indeed, since the 1992 presidential campaign—Bill Clinton has been subject to unusually partisan and unusually personal attacks, as have his policies. Clinton's ability to “spin” events to his advantage, his remarkable ability to connect—or appear to connect— with the concerns of individual voters, and his ability to outmaneuver Republicans in the political arena have all infuriated the increasingly conservative Republican members of Congress, some of whom no longer hide their contempt for the president.
The Republicans have expended considerable effort to expose what they perceive to be serious transgressions by the president and his wife, his aides, and his cabinet officers. Numerous investigations have had the dual effect of energizing the Republican party, particularly its right-wing members, and sapping the strength of the administration. And after the Senate's refusal in early 1999 to convict and remove the president over lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, relations between Democrats and Republicans grew so strained that normal bipartisan communication about routine business essentially evaporated.
In the frigid political climate that pervaded the Senate in 1999, a strategy designed to hound and embarrass Republicans into releasing the CTBT— which was already facing an uphill battle to ratification—was not an astute approach.
Nevertheless, the Democrats kept at it. On August 30, the New York Times published a front page article headlined, “Democrats Ready for Fight to Save Test Ban Treaty.” “Armed with public opinion polls and the support of many scientists, military commanders, and arms control groups, Democrats are threatening to bring the Senate to a standstill when Congress returns next month from summer recess unless Republicans agree to hold hearings this year on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which 152 nations have signed,” reported the Times. The article laid out the three possible avenues the Democrats could use. First, they might “generate public pressure by painting Republicans as reckless” to force Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott to overrule Helms and release the treaty for debate. Second, they might “tie the Senate floor in knots until Lott relents,” a tactic that “Democrats have used successfully in the past.” (Dorgan and Minority Leader Thomas Daschle were reported to be “willing to wage that kind of guerrilla warfare if needed.”) Finally, the administration could negotiate changes to the ABM Treaty with Russia to allow for a limited national missile defense system, at the same time pursuing even deeper reductions in deployed nuclear weapons with a START III agreement to gain Russian acceptance of limited defensive measures. Such agreements could, in theory, reverse Republican resistance and free the CTBT. But as Biden warned in the article, “The President has to play a major role. He could affect this more than he has.”
October 6, 1999: Republican Senators Jesse Helms and John Warner. Helms wanted the treaty to be defeated; Warner tried to engineer a delay-the-vote compromise.
The campaign began in earnest on September 8, when Dorgan delivered a speech castigating Lott for a failure of leadership and calling once again for swift consideration and approval of the treaty before the Senate adjourned for the year. Otherwise, he warned, he would plant himself “on the floor like a potted plant” and prevent the transaction of any other Senate business.
What Dorgan—and the rest of the Democrats, the administration, and the non-governmental organizations working so diligently to generate public support for ratification—did not know was that the Senate Republicans had been working for at least four months to solidify enough opposition to the treaty to deny the Democrats the 67 votes required for ratification. The Republicans weren't getting mad; they were getting even.
Setting the trap
According to reports in the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, and the National Review, Republican Jon Kyl of Arizona began the effort to counter just the sort of campaign envisioned by the Democrats that had worked so well in the past on budget matters and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Working in secret, Kyl and Paul Coverdell of Georgia met with other Republican colleagues to sound out opinions about the treaty. Sometimes they brought with them former government officials who opposed the treaty, particularly James Schlesinger, whose portfolio included heading the departments of Defense and Energy, chairing the Atomic Energy Commission, and serving as director of Central Intelligence. By May, Kyl and Coverdell reported to Lott and Helms that they had 30 definite “no” votes. According to the Weekly Standard, Lott “indicated for the first time that he might be willing to bring the treaty up for a vote later in the year.” Helms, according to the Times, told them to “get me more.” During the August recess, Kyl and Coverdell recruited fellow Republicans Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama to their cause. They also compiled briefing books for their colleagues “containing countless articles and memos making the case against the treaty,” according to the Weekly Standard. Much of what was in those briefing books was no doubt supplied or recommended by the Center for Security Policy, a right-wing organization headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan administration official who resigned from the Defense Department in late 1987 to protest the signing of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and other actions he deemed objectionable. Gaffney, who is well connected with conservative Republicans, has proven skillful over the years—especially since the Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 elections—in promoting the “re-nuclearization” of the U.S. military, the evisceration of the ABM and START agreements, and the torpedoing of presidential nominees who in any way or at any time have appeared to question or undermine U.S. military power generally and nuclear deterrence in particular.
Following the recess, Kyl and Coverdell informed Lott and Helms that there were 34 “no” votes, enough to deny ratification. But Lott and Helms pressed for an additional six negative votes before agreeing to the Democrats' demands. Nevertheless, the Republicans “could barely contain their glee” wrote Matthew Rees in the Weekly Standard, as they watched Dorgan, Biden, and Daschle press for a vote. The Democrats were unaware of the solidity of the opposition.
Meanwhile, CTBT proponents were busy encouraging newspapers to run editorials about the treaty stalemate (more than 100 were published, fewer than 10 of which opposed the treaty) and releasing polls that consistently showed 80 percent or greater public support for the treaty. (Ironically, these editorials and polling data helped spur the anti-treaty effort by convincing the Republicans, wrongly as it turned out, that the administration planned to make the CTBT a major issue.) But in Washington, the Republicans were closing ranks and focusing on the only thing that really mattered: the minds and votes of their colleagues.
Kyl and Coverdell brought two former senior officials from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to speak to senators and answer their questions about the treaty. On September 21, James Schlesinger gave a persuasive presentation about his concerns. According to the Weekly Standard, this event “was the turning point in bringing wavering Republicans round to opposing the treaty.” Lott himself later remarked, “James Schle-singer was the one that had the greatest impact on me.”
By late September, 44 Republicans were firmly against the treaty, although the Democrats didn't know it. On September 22, Daschle, Biden, and other treaty supporters met with Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, to plan their next steps. Biden argued for pressing forward with Dorgan's threat to bring the Senate to a standstill. “At the time, we felt we needed to bring this to a head, any way we could,” he told the Times after the vote. Berger asked what would happen if the Republicans “call for an up or down vote” on the treaty. Biden replied, “It's not the best way, but it's better than nothing.”
Showdown
One week later, Lott told Biden he would allow the treaty to come up for a vote if the Democrats abandoned their threats to obstruct Senate business. The Democrats accepted. On September 30, Lott offered a unanimous consent request (a procedural motion usually reserved for uncontroversial matters, requiring the approval of all 100 senators) for 10 hours of general debate to begin October 6, followed by an immediate vote.
Caught unprepared, the Democrats objected, which put them in the politically awkward position of appearing to be against the very thing they had been asking for—something Lott and other Republicans would repeatedly chide them about during the debate.
But what the Democrats were opposing and would continue to object to throughout the debate was the process. Normally, the Foreign Relations Committee would have held several days of hearings over a period of several weeks or months. The committee would then have voted on whether to recommend ratification to the full Senate. The Senate then would have scheduled many hours of debate, including debate over possible amendments. Under the expedited procedure Lott had crafted, the only thing guaranteed was the vote.
Still, on October 1 the Democrats accepted Lott's unanimous consent offer, though they persuaded him to increase the time for the debate to 14 hours and push the starting date back to October 8. Biden and Daschle were not comfortable with this outcome, but neither they nor their colleagues believed they had much choice. As Biden said at a press conference that day, “Our choice is to either let it die by attrition and [have] no one be held accountable, or take a shot at it and have the president and all of us make the strongest case we can between now and the time of the vote.”
Completely ignored by the Democrats in this hasty decision-making process were the non-governmental organizations that had labored, in some cases for years, to achieve the CTBT and who were, at that moment, rounding up prominent treaty supporters and preparing to launch multiple campaigns to mobilize public support for ratification.
An unnamed administration official would later tell the Times that “the White House didn't see this coming.” That suggests two major failings of the administration's approach to ratification: not designating a single official to coordinate the effort, as was done, for example, with NATO expansion; and a lack of communication between the White House and Senate Democrats. Another failing, of course, was the lack of sustained involvement by the president.
For all the charges from President Clinton and Senate Democrats that partisan politics derailed the CTBT, the Democrats were not above politics themselves. Senator Biden's comments in this regard are telling. At the October 1 press conference, Biden told reporters that by agreeing to the debate, “Essentially we've accomplished one of our purposes; you're writing about this.” He added, “If this gets voted down … is it reasonable that we're going to get to the point where we change people's minds within the next year, or try to bring it up next year? And my answer is, it's amazing what public opinion will do to people.”
Biden also said he had been approached by two Republicans who asked him not to press for action on the treaty, telling him he should let it “die gracefully.” When they told him they were going to vote no and that, with the outcome a foregone conclusion, there was no point in a vote, Biden told them, “I got it. You want us to help you kill the treaty so you're not responsible. Wonderful.”
Relating this to reporters, Biden concluded, “The question is, are you going to die—do you want to die with no one knowing who shot you, or do you want to die at least with the world knowing who killed you?”
Back-tracking
The White House and the Democrats tried to muster more support for the treaty but it was soon obvious that defeat was certain if the vote were held. On October 11, Clinton sent a letter to the Senate urging a postponement:
“I believe that proceeding to a vote under these circumstances would severely harm the national security of the United States, damage our relationship with our allies, and undermine our historic leadership over 40 years, through administrations Republican and Democratic, in reducing the nuclear threat. Accordingly, I request that you postpone consideration of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on the Senate floor.”
On October 12, with the debate nearing its conclusion, New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Virginia Republican John Warner circulated a letter to their colleagues urging a similar course of action. “We support putting off final consideration [of the treaty] until the next Congress,” said the letter, signed by 62 senators and submitted to Lott and Daschle.
Knowing that Lott and other Republicans were concerned about the president and the Democrats attempting to use the treaty politically in the 2000 elections, Daschle wrote to Lott on October 12. “Like the President, supporters of the CTBT have reluctantly concluded that the Senate will fail to ratify the CTBT at this time and that a vote in light of this reality risks grave damage to our national security interests. Therefore, I support the President's request to postpone the vote. Absent unforeseen changes in the international situation, I will not seek to reschedule this vote.”
When Lott objected to the phrase “unforeseen changes in the international situation,” Daschle changed it to “extraordinary circumstances,” and explicitly said it was designed to cover a resumption of nuclear testing by India or Pakistan.
But Lott and his colleagues were not satisfied. Lott demanded an agreement with no loopholes to allow the president or the Democrats to bring up the treaty in the midst of an election year. Not surprisingly, the administration found that demand an unacceptable encroachment on the president's constitutional powers.
October 13, 1999: Democrat Jake Reed of Rhode Island discussed the treaty with the army's Gen. Thomas Schwartz, shortly before the vote.
The most likely “unforeseen changes” or “extraordinary circumstances” would be the potential unraveling of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) at its next review conference in May 2000. If the president felt that resub-mitting the treaty could forestall a weakening of the NPT regime, he certainly did not want to do anything to make such a move impossible.
Lott was also under extreme pressure from his Republican colleagues Kyl, Coverdell, and Helms, as well as Robert Smith of New Hampshire and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, not to postpone the vote. These senators were convinced that the treaty was “fatally flawed” and that postponement was merely delaying the inevitable. Kyl also argued that as long as the treaty was pending before the Senate, the United States was bound by its terms. Only a rejection would allow the eventual resumption of underground nuclear testing. They further warned Lott of personal political repercussions should he agree to delay the vote.
Lott, who during the ratification process for the Chemical Weapons Convention had acceded to the president's request to withdraw the treaty and subsequently voted for it, much to the chagrin of his more conservative colleagues, apparently got the message and, according to Newsweek's analysis, reneged on a handshake deal with Daschle to postpone the vote. A telephone call from the president two hours before the vote—the first time Clinton had spoken to Lott about the treaty since submitting it for ratification two years earlier—did nothing to change his mind.
The debate
The debate, such as it was, was anti-climactic. Senators stuck mostly to prepared texts, reading their remarks to a largely empty Senate chamber. Nevertheless, it had several striking elements.
The two main arguments against the treaty—that it was unverifiable and that it would undermine the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons and hence deterrence—have been around since the first test ban discussions in the mid-1950s. Opponents brought little new to the debate aside from the argument that a test ban would force the United States to live with “unsafe” weapons. Proponents did little to rebut decades-old concerns that were no longer relevant or were shown long ago to be overblown if not outright wrong.
When the Republicans focused on verification or the need to retain unquestioned nuclear superiority, the Democrats generally countered with why the treaty was an important international agreement and how every president since Eisenhower had fought for it. (This was not exactly true: Reagan supported a test ban as a long-term goal but did nothing about it while in office. Bush scaled back the testing program in 1992, but only in an unsuccessful effort to head off a pre-election vote on a testing moratorium in the Senate.)
Perhaps the most telling part of the debate was what was not said. Opponents spoke frequently about needing to ensure that U.S. nuclear weapons were as safe as possible. Safety and reliability were often lumped together, though they are very different things. Near the beginning of the debate, Kyl argued that “few people know that many of our current weapons do not contain all the safety features that already have been invented by our national laboratories. Only one of the nine [types of] weapons in the current stockpile incorporates all six available safety features…. The bottom line is that a ban on nuclear testing prevents us from making our weapons as safe as we know how to make them and creates a disincentive to making such safety improvements.”
To non-experts (which must include nearly every senator), this sounds like a genuine concern. Who could not favor having the safest possible nuclear weapons?
The navy and the air force, for starters. When the weapons mentioned by Kyl were under development, officials with these services weighed increased safety with decreased operational effectiveness and chose effectiveness over safety most of the time. The navy, for example, considered using insensitive high explosives (IHEs) in the W88 warhead but ultimately opted for more volatile conventional high explosives because IHEs, which are not as energetic pound-for-pound, increased the weight and volume of each warhead, which in turn decreased the number of warheads that could be packed atop each Trident II/D-5 missile as well as the missile's range. Even after these facts were made public in 1991, when questions were first raised about the safety of a number of warheads in the arsenal, the navy decided to reduce the risk of an accidental explosion by modifying how warheads were loaded onto missiles, not by employing IHEs.
Proponents also left unchallenged claims about the efficacy of nuclear deterrence. For example, Senator Lott was one of many who asserted that “the U.S. nuclear deterrent was essential in persuading Saddam Hussein not to use chemical or biological weapons during the 1991 Gulf War, undoubtedly saving thousands of lives.” Kyl quoted the former head of Iraqi military intelligence who reportedly said, “Some of the Scud missiles were loaded with chemical warheads, but they were not used. We didn't use them because the other side had a deterrent force.”
This often-cited example sounds compelling, but as William Arkin has written in these pages and elsewhere, it's not true.
President Bush did threaten Iraq— in a letter to Saddam Hussein written on January 5, 1991—with the “strongest possible response” (generally considered a nuclear threat) if it used nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or if it should destroy the Kuwaiti oil fields. Yet just days before the start of the air campaign on January 17, 1991 (Baghdad time), Iraqi forces moved 157 bombs filled with botulinum, anthrax, and aflatoxin to airfields in western Iraq. Twenty-five warheads for Al Hussein missiles filled with the same materials were made ready for use at additional sites. As Arkin has written, the weather at the start of the war was not conducive to using these weapons (winds would have blown the agents back on Iraqi forces that were poorly equipped with defensive measures). The speed of the air war and the allies' success in destroying much of Iraq's equipment and command-and-control network were the more likely reasons why Iraq failed to use its biological weapons. Since Iraq had deployed some biological weapons and set fire to the oil fields, it seems unlikely that the nuclear threat made by the president weighed heavily on Saddam Hussein. (In any event, Bush had—before the start of the war—privately ruled out using nuclear weapons against Iraq.)
In a similar vein, Senator Lott argued that it was nuclear deterrence that guaranteed the security of Western Europe from the late 1940s until the Soviet Union finally collapsed. But the notion that nuclear weapons were the best, or perhaps the only, thing standing between a stable Europe and World War III is also popular but equally unprovable. Advocates of this line of reasoning tend to ignore other factors that contributed to the peaceful outcome of the Cold War, including the NATO alliance and the military forces deployed by the European allies; the massive U.S. investment in conventional military forces; actual Soviet intentions toward Europe (as distinct from the Soviet Union's seemingly formidable military machine); and in the mid- to late 1980s, the impact of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Kyl claimed that “many new [nuclear weapon] designs were required during the Cold War to sustain deterrence,” ignoring the fact that the genesis for the majority of the 65 types of warheads the United States manufactured was not a specific military requirement but the result of interservice rivalries and competition between Los Alamos and Lawrence Liv-ermore. Each of the services wanted a variety of their own weapons to guarantee control over new missions and mission funding.
October 10, 1999: Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, supporting the test ban treaty on Meet the Press.
When Al Gore and William Cohen made statements supporting the test ban, opponents produced their speeches from many years before, arguing just the opposite. And not a single treaty proponent pointed out that the world was a very different place back then. In a series of “Decision Briefs” prepared by Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, pro-treaty statements by retired military officials, including former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, were juxtaposed with their earlier anti-test ban remarks—some from as long as 21 years ago.
Treaty opponents insisted that the United States, hobbled by a test ban, would be powerless to prevent aggression against itself or its allies. But none of the proponents of the treaty pointed out that a considerably larger and more diverse arsenal had failed to prevent Iraq from invading Kuwait in 1990. And what about the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983? Or Afghanistan in 1979? Or Czechoslovakia in 1968? Or Vietnam?
Kyl, in a discussion of whether a test could evade detection under the treaty, opined that “decoupling”—ex-cavating a large, spherical underground cavern to muffle the noise of a nuclear blast—”is technologically simple to achieve.” In fact, decoupling is an expensive, uncertain, and time-consuming undertaking that offers no guarantee of success, particularly for a state with little or no underground testing experience (which includes everyone except the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and possibly China).
Senator Inhofe argued that North Korea has a missile “called the Taepo Dong I that will reach Washington, D.C., from anyplace in the world.” This missile, which North Korea test-launched for the first and only time in August 1998, broke up before the end of its flight. It is hardly operational, and even if it were, at its estimated maximum range it could reach only Hawaii or Alaska from its launch site in North Korea.
Inhofe also got carried away at one point, insisting that “virtually every country has weapons of mass destruction,” a remark that Dorgan did not let pass unchallenged. But when another Republican charged that the Clinton administration has presided over the worst period of nuclear proliferation in history, specifically citing India and Pakistan, no Democrat rose to point out that the Reagan and Bush administrations had turned a blind eye to Pakistan's nuclear program for at least five years, the better to funnel aid through that country to the mujahideen fighting Soviet forces in neighboring Afghanistan.
Lott declared, “It is through [explosive] testing of the U.S. nuclear stockpile that the United States has maintained its confidence in the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons,” citing a controversial 1987 report from Livermore to buttress his case. That report, however, was challenged not only in a series of three reports written in 1987 and 1991 by Ray Kidder, a physicist and weapons designer at Liv-ermore, but also in a 1995 joint report by Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national laboratories.
What those reports reveal is that the United States has never relied primarily on nuclear testing either to identify or fix problems with nuclear weapons. Of approximately 830 “findings” of defects in stockpiled weapons between 1958 and 1993, fewer than one percent were discovered via nuclear tests and only one test out of the 387 conducted since 1970 was for the purpose of “detecting” an age-related problem in a weapon. (That problem was resolved without modifying the weapons' nuclear components.) No more than three percent (11) of the 387 tests since 1970 were conducted for the purpose of ensuring warhead reliability. The primary purpose of nuclear testing was, and remains, the development of new types of nuclear weapons.
Brave new world
Whether intended or not, the arguments the Republicans deployed against the CTBT illuminate the desire to establish what might be termed Pax Americana II. This was most clearly demonstrated in comments by Senators Inhofe and Sessions. Inhofe, quoting colleague Phil Gramm of Texas, said, “We have to remain strong. We all wish for the day and hope for the day when the lion and the lamb can lie down together. But when that day comes, I want to make sure we are the lion.” As Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek the week of the vote, “Nice line, but it doesn't mean much if the lamb is packing nuclear heat.”
Sessions warned his colleagues about international treaties in provocative terms. “We have to watch them, I think. It is Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians, stretched out, unable to move, because he has been tied down by a whole host of threads.”
President Clinton excoriated the senators who led the charge against the CTBT as the “new isolationists.” But isolationism is hardly what senators like Helms and Kyl and Lott are seeking. What these senators and their counterparts in the House of Representatives seem to want is to dominate the world militarily, economically, and maybe even culturally. They want to return to Cold War-era levels of military spending, resume the production and, yes, testing of nuclear weapons, and deploy a nationwide defense against ballistic missile attack so that the United States can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, wherever it wants, without having to seek the approval or cooperation of anyone else. Or, as an anonymous Senate aide told the Washington Times after the vote, “The CTBT is just the warm-up exercise for the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.”
Whether the American people, not to mention the rest of the world, will embrace or reject this world view remains to be seen. In the meantime, a majority of U.S. senators, including many who do not subscribe to this military-based unilateralism, have cynically ensured that there will be more, and more sophisticated, nuclear threats to challenge as yet unbuilt and unproven ballistic missile defenses, thereby ensuring that a renewed and difficult-to-constrain cycle of strategic weapons procurement is the most likely outcome of their shortsighted political maneuvering.