SHAHEEN SOUNDS NOTE OF PESSIMISM ON CTBT PROSPECTS IN SENATE

One of the top Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday offered a dim view of the prospects for the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and urged the Obama Administration to wait until after the current 113th Congress to submit the treaty to the Senate. “I think it would be better not to take up the treaty in this session of Congress,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said at the State Department’s Generation Prague conference yesterday. “There needs to be a lot of education, groundwork done before that happens. I think that’s where we need to start.” Senate ratification of the CTBT, which failed in 1999, has been one of the pillars of the Obama Administration’s nuclear security agenda since President Obama took office, but difficulties in getting the New START Treaty passed during Obama’s first term forced CTBT to take a backseat to other priorities. Senate Republicans have since suggested that the Administration’s failure to come through on all of the promises it made regarding modernizing the nation’s nuclear stockpile and weapons complex during debate on the treaty make it unlikely that CTBT will have enough support in the Senate. Yesterday, acting Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller said there was still much more the Administration had to do before submitting the treaty to the Senate, but she noted that improvements to the treaty’s international monitoring system and the Stockpile Stewardship Program should convince treaty naysayers. “We need to do our homework and get that story out,” Gottemoeller said, adding, “I think there are some good possibilities but we’ve got some hard work to do first.”