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Nuclear Test Ban Conference Ends With Treaty’s Entry Into Force Still a Distant Goal By Jim Wurst UNITED NATIONS — The parties to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty ended their conference Friday pledging to continue to press for the pact’s entry into force. However, that remains a distant goal because a small group of countries have not dropped their opposition to the treaty (see GSN, Sept. 22). In a declaration on Friday, treaty states said they “will spare no efforts and use all avenues” to encourage further ratifications and to “sustain the momentum generated by this conference” to keep it on the national agendas “at the highest political level.” Many speakers pointed out that even without an operating treaty, wide support for the prohibition and the continuing moratoria on nuclear testing is making a test ban a “norm” of international relations. If this were a traditional arms control treaty, it would have entered into force years ago. In nine years, the treaty has garnered 176 signatories, of which 125 have ratified the document. The test ban treaty, though, contains a unique provision that blocks its entry into force unless ratified by a specific list of 44 countries. The 44 nations have nuclear research or nuclear power reactors; the list includes all the nuclear-weapon states both inside and outside the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, along with those considered most capable of developing a nuclear arms capability. Eleven of the 44 have not ratified the treaty, most notably the United States. The Bush administration has consistently said it would never support the pact, has worked to delete references to the treaty in other international documents and did not send any representatives to the conference. Three other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — France, Russia and the United Kingdom — have ratified the treaty. China has signed but not ratified. Deputy Ambassador Zhand Yishan said ratification is before the relevant legislative committee and work “is under way in a serious and orderly fashion.” He added that “relevant work is progressing smoothly” in preparation of 12 monitoring stations needed for treaty verification that are to be built in China. While most of the attention is on the refusal of the United States to support the treaty, others among the 11 holdouts are also not rushing to ratify the treaty. Three — India, Pakistan, and North Korea — have not even signed the agreement. “Regional security issues” are complicating efforts to persuade the 11 nations to ratify the treaty, said Ambassador Jaap Ramaker of the Netherlands, the special representative charged with promoting ratification. He said Pakistani officials told him the test ban was not a priority and that “its relations to India, not the least in its strategic nuclear relationship, is paramount.” Ramaker said he was also “given to understand [that] I was not welcome in India.” Egypt, Iran and Israel have signed but not ratified the treaty, and security concerns are likely to keep them from promoting its entry into force. Egypt’s representative to the conference said his nation supported the objectives of the treaty but could not “regard it as a secluded legal instrument apart from the common objectives” of nuclear disarmament and universal nonproliferation. Israel also said it backed the treaty but that long-standing concerns needed to be addressed before ratification, including questions of “immunity to abuse.” Iran did not address the conference. Iraq, which is not one of the 44 “Annex A” nations, announced on Friday that it planned to sign the treaty. Several other nations signed or ratified the treaty just prior to the opening of the conference. “Despite such progress and widespread public support for the treaty, inaction and opposition by a few states have delayed its full implementation,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said Friday. “There remains much to be done at this conference and beyond to ensure that the CTBT is not tossed aside at the whim of a few states.” Addressing the conference on behalf of some 20 nongovernmental organizations, Kimball said the treaty “is a critical building block in the architecture of the global nuclear nonproliferation system” and “an essential step towards nuclear disarmament because it helps to discourage dangerous nuclear competition and block new nuclear threats from emerging.” “The CTBT also reduces uncertainties in an increasingly uncertain world” because its monitoring system “has already and will continue to build confidence that no state can defy the nontesting norm and escape detection,” Kimball said. He added: “We urge states to consider how the CTBT might contribute to nuclear risk reduction in regions of tension,” such as South Asia and the Korean Peninsula. Progress has also been made on the technical side of the treaty regime. The treaty has an operating verification system even while the pact itself is not in force. A network of 321 stations for the monitoring of seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide events is planned to cover the entire planet – from the surface to the air and beneath the earth and seas. Ambassador Tibor Toth, chief of the Preparatory Commission for the test ban organization, said Wednesday that 217 of the 321 stations have been installed — 115 over the last two years. At a news conference Friday, he said most of the geographic gaps in system were in South Asia and Africa.
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