Reviving the treaty the first to fail in the Senate since the Treaty of Versailles after World War I would be a huge step toward preventing the emergence of new nuclear weapons states and controlling nuclear outlaws, the two Cabinet members believe.
But the odds against the international pact may be even greater than what the Iran deal faced. The Republican-controlled Senate has few, if any, arms control advocates left. And it seems far more interested in depriving the president of another key victory than digesting new evidence that the U.S. doesnt even need to conduct test explosions of its nuclear arsenal something it hasnt done since 1992.
Nonetheless, an unscripted moment Wednesday in a hallway at the Naval Heritage Center in the shadow of the Capitol demonstrated how much the nuclear pact is on Kerry's and Moniz's minds and remains a goal of Obama, who made nuclear disarmament a key objective at the start of his presidency.
Lets do it, Kerry told Moniz after theyd both delivered remarks to a gathering of nuclear weapons scientists and arms control gurus about the need for the United States to revisit the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Lets get the conversation going, Moniz agreed, while tossing in a reference to upcoming climate talks in France. Lets go to Paris and then well do it.
But getting the Senate to revisit let alone ratify the treaty is set to run into a buzz saw in Congress.
Hours after Kerry and Moniz announced that they'll begin a campaign to educate senators about the treaty, freshman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) denounced the treaty as "flawed and unwise" and called the duos effort "almost comical."
One of the fiercest critics of Obamas Iran pact, Cotton repeated his charge that the administration "gave away the farm during those negotiations. He also signaled another line of attack namely that Russia, which unlike the United States has already ratified the test ban treaty, has recently reneged on another arms control pact, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was designed to control medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Since Russia is the only nuclear power on par with the United States, the argument goes, agreeing to another pact in which Moscow plays a central role would be dangerous.
It wasnt in our national security interests then, its not in our interests now, and it wont be in the future," Cotton said in a statement. "If the Obama administration intends to reopen the discussion over Senate ratification of the CTBT then I intend to reopen the fight against it.
An aide to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), said the panel "has received no communication from the administration on this issue" and that Corker "sees no environment in which the committee or the Senate would take it up anytime soon."
The international negotiations that led to the test ban treaty, first envisioned by Kerry's political hero John F. Kennedy half a century ago, were completed in Geneva in 1996. It has been signed by 184 countries and ratified by 164 of them. But it cannot enter into force until it is ratified by eight more, including the United States.
Ironically, the first country to sign the treaty was the United States. And it was three years later that President Bill Clinton sent it to the Senate for ratification, where it needed a two-thirds majority but came up short, 51-48.
For Kerry, it remains personal. At the time, he was a Democratic senator from Massachusetts and a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee who watched in disappointment as the Senate voted down a treaty for the first time in 80 years.
"I was deeply engaged in that debate," Kerry recalled at Wednesday's event, blaming Senate procedures that he said "prevented a full and fair presentation and discussion."
The event was sponsored by the Energy Department to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the so-called Stockpile Stewardship Program, Energy's effort to use computer simulations to ensure that America's nuclear arsenal is ready in the event of the unthinkable and that potential enemies know it, too.
The U.S. has not exploded an atomic weapon since 1992, when it conducted an underground test in the Nevada desert its 1,035th since the first, code-named Trinity, in the summer of 1945.
Russia, which became a nuclear weapons power in 1949, unilaterally announced a testing moratorium in 1991. A number of other nuclear powers, including France, China and Britain, have similarly adhered to a two-decade-plus moratorium on explosive tests.
The primary reason for that: advances in computer simulation.
Experts say advanced modeling make explosive atomic tests unnecessary, and the construction over the last 15 years of an international detection system makes it nearly impossible for a rogue nation to cheat without being caught.
"Now its in place, now its working, now we know what it can do, now we have progressed and perfected our understanding of the virtue of this approach," said Joan Rohlfing, a senior Energy Department official in the Clinton administration. "And thus we have removed the single greatest blockade to approval of the CTBT."
Kerry said much the same on Wednesday. "We now have the ability to simulate without explosive testing which is obviously a benefit to the environment, a benefit to our security and extremely helpful in the context of Americas global leadership," he said.
But arms control experts say the biggest change on display at the gathering was that for the first time directors of all three of America's nuclear weapons labs Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia agreed.
"What's different this week is you have the lab directors themselves providing their personal testimony to that assertion," said Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group that backs the test ban treaty.
Meanwhile, the international monitoring system set up as part of the treaty now consists of 170 seismic monitoring stations in 73 countries. Eleven additional stations are designed to detect undersea explosions, 60 detect frequency waves generated by nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and 80 radionuclide detectors to pick up radioactive particles in the air. The overall system detected, for example, the three underground tests conducted by North Korea.
Two studies by the National Academy of Sciences found strong evidence that the international monitoring system can detect a nuclear explosion anywhere in the world.
That system was "literally just a concept" in 1999, Kerry said. "Today, it is nearly complete, technically advanced, a global network of sensors that can detect even low-yield nuclear explosions."
But beginning what Kerry calls a "full and fair presentation and discussion" about the test ban treaty on Capitol Hill now faces major hurdles.
The Senate no longer contains many knowledgeable members on nuclear arms control akin to the bipartisan group that was deeply engaged on the issue in the 1990s and often traveled to personally observe treaty negotiations in Switzerland. That group included Democrats like Sam Nunn and Ted Kennedy and Republicans like Richard Lugar and John Warner.
When it came time to present treaties to the Senate you had a cadre of very well informed leaders," Rohlfing noted. That doesnt exist anymore. Treaties have become much more partisan with the current Congress than they ever used to be in the good old days.
Kerry, in his remarks, estimated that as many as 85 of 100 senators were not around in 1999, evidence of what he called a "lack of knowledge of a whole bunch of senators who have never, ever negotiated or been involved in a debate about arms control" or witnessed landmark nuclear arms control talks like those conducted by President Ronald Reagan.
"That's a hurdle," he said and why new congressional hearings and other outreach from the nuclear weapons community is so critical at this stage.
"We are working to engage them to make sure they have all the facts and information at their disposal," said an administration official with knowledge of the issue who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment.
Many nuclear weapons and arms control experts assert that the treaty's time has come, even with a newly confrontational Russia.
It would be better for lots of reasons if the relationship with Russia were not so tense now," Rohlfing acknowledged. "That said, arguably the real benefit of this treaty is its ability to prevent states with much less of a test pedigree from really improving and developing next generation systems. We and the Russians have conducted more than 1,000 tests. There is not a lot more we are going to learn through explosive tests."
But while the national security arguments for ratifying the treaty appear convincing they simply won't translate politically, especially going into an election year, said Gary Samore, Obama's former White House adviser on arms control. He believes U.S. ratification would impel China, India and possibly even Pakistan to ratify the treaty, too.
Calling for the Senate to take up the treaty too soon "would be walking right into a buzzsaw," he said. "Nobody wants to see the treaty defeated the second time."
This article was written by Bryan Bender for Politico on Oct. 26, 2015.
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