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Senators Call for Test Ban Treaty Ratification By Jon Fox The text of the preliminary bill has not been released following initial committee approval, but Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said the spending plan included a statement suggesting that the United States “should ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.” The language, which is supposed to represent the “sense of the Senate”, was inserted “with no hearings and no real discussions,” he said. The Republican-controlled Senate rejected the treaty in 1999 by a vote of 51 to 48, far short of the two-thirds majority needed to send the pact back to the president with the Senate’s advice and consent for ratification. The treaty obligates its parties to refrain from nuclear testing, but the pact cannot take effect until 44 specific nations ratify it. Ten countries have so far refused to join the treaty, putting “That was a blast from the past,” Sessions said yesterday of the bill’s language. “You know we had a big fight over that.” Speaking at a breakfast meeting held by the National Defense University Foundation, Sessions said the call for treaty ratification is likely to be challenged when the bill moves to the full Senate for a final approval. “I don’t know that we’re going accept that language. I suspect we’re going to have a fight over that,” he said. “I don’t see CTBT as something we need to pass right now.” Then-President Bill Clinton signed the treaty in 1996, but ran into fierce Republican political resistance and ultimately lost the battle for the treaty’s approval. The This is not the first time discussion of the treaty has surfaced in the current Congress. Earlier this year, lawmakers raised the issue in the context of the Bush administration’s push for a program to replace some nuclear warheads in the The new Reliable Replacement Warheads would include technology to prevent detonation if terrorists stole any warheads, would be less likely to fail if ever used and would be easier to produce and maintain, administration officials have argued in pressing for the program. The warheads would also be able to enter the stockpile without explosive testing, a make-or-break criteria for many in Congress, including Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees the deployment of nuclear weapons. In January, Tauscher appeared to link the test ban treaty and approval for the new warhead design during a speech in In the fiscal 2006 defense authorization bill, Democrats, then in the minority, noted that they were “willing to explore the RRW concept, but do not yet embrace it.” The program would only be worthy of support, they said, if it eliminates or reduces the need for nuclear testing and leads to ratification and entry into force of the test ban treaty. “We were disappointed that the majority could not agree that the ultimate goal of the RRW program should be to help ensure the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” they wrote. One of the arguments against ratification of the test ban treaty, that testing might be a last resort against technical uncertainty in an aging Cold War-era stockpile, “will be removed” if the RRW program proceeds, Democratic lawmakers noted. Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) in April called on senior Bush administration officials to more strongly promote the RRW program, suggesting a new warhead deployable without explosive testing could change international opinion on the test ban treaty. “I would like to discuss with you how this could impact the administration’s decision to revisit its position on the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and if you believe that such action would guarantee that countries like India, Pakistan and North Korea would sign on [to] the treaty and would encourage China, Iran, Indonesia and Egypt to follow the U.S. action to ratify the treaty,” Domenici wrote in a letter to the secretaries of defense and state and to national security adviser Stephen Hadley. Observers, though, see little chance of that the test ban treaty would be ratified in the remaining 18 months of the Bush White House. “I don’t think there’s any hope of it being ratified by the Senate with the current administration,” said David Culp, with the antinuclear lobbying group the Friends Committee on National Legislation. “You’d need a new administration who vigorously supported it.” House Cuts RRW FundingThe House version of the fiscal 2007 defense authorization bill trimmed $20 million from the president’s $88.8 million request for RRW work within the Energy Department and cut $25 million of a $30 million request for RRW work within the Navy (see GSN, May 3). A House energy and water appropriations bill completely eliminated any money for the controversial program, calling for a re-evaluation of the Sessions avoided the specific funding levels set in the Senate bill for the new warhead program but said the Armed Services Committee “was generally supportive of the Reliable Replacement Warhead, which I think needs to go forward.” Sessions, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Forces Strategic Forces Subcommittee, called the Reliable Replacement Warhead logical and reiterated the administration’s assertion that it would allow the United States to further reduce its stockpile (see GSN, June 7, and GSN, May 22). He cautioned, however, against drawing the “We need to keep them high,” he said. “It’s my view that we don’t need to draw down our nuclear weapons so significantly that any jack-legged country thinks they can be a peer competitor to the
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