After nearly 20 years, the U.S. Senate must undertake a new review of the potential nonproliferation benefits provided by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, CTBT Organization Executive Secretary Lassina Zerbo and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov wrote in a commentary published last week in The Diplomat.
Senators rejected ratification of the treaty in 1999, and no presidential administration since then has put the question back before the upper chamber of Congress. That leaves the United States among eight key nations that must still ratify the global ban on nuclear test explosions if it is to enter into force. The others are China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan; only North Korea today conducts explosive nuclear testing.
While the Obama administration never followed through on its pledge to bring the CTBT back to the Senate for advice and consent, it did in its final months in 2016 support a nonbinding U.N. Security Council resolution that called for the holdout states to ratify the 1996 treaty “without further delay” and for all governments to avoid nuclear testing.
“It is essential that we translate these words into action. This begins with a reexamination of the assumptions harbored by the eight remaining states for delaying action on their ratification of the treaty,” Zerbo and Ryabkov wrote. “For the United States, this requires a serious review and debate in the Senate about the benefits of the CTBT, and its implications for national and international security. It has been a quarter-century since the last U.S. nuclear test explosion, yet the U.S. Senate has not reviewed the treaty since late-1999.”
Since then the U.S. capacity to maintain its nuclear arsenal has increased, as has the worldwide web on sensors that would detect any nuclear blast, the two indicated.
There has been no sign that the Trump administration would bring the question of CTBT ratification to the Senate, or that the Republican-controlled chamber would support the idea.
