Obama Urged to Keep Pledge to Ratify Nuclear Treaty

January 26th, 2009|Editor
State

“There is a problem and regulation is needed,” Tibor Toth, 54, director of the Vienna-based United Nations treaty organization that is seeking to outlaw atomic weapons testing, said yesterday in an interview. “The arrangements in place to address the threat posed by nuclear weapons are showing cracks in the facade.”

The U.S. is one of nine countries that have yet to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The U.S. Senate rejected the treaty in 1999 after Bill Clintons impeachment hearings. George W. Bushs administration wanted to reserve the right to build and test new atomic weapons and allowed a treaty vote to languish.

“People are using words to describe a grievous financial crisis that have been coined to describe the type of nuclear- weapons bubble we have,” said Toth, a Hungarian diplomat. “We dont want that bubble to burst.” He cited expressions such as “meltdown” that are used by financial analysts.

Among the greatest current threats are those posed by North Korea, which withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and has built a bomb, and Iran, which has ignored UN resolutions ordering it to halt uranium enrichment amid allegations by the U.S. and many of its allies that it plans to make a bomb.

Key Tool

Iran, which is an NPT signatory, says its program is designed solely to produce electricity. The NPT seeks to stop the acquisition of nuclear weapons by putting safeguards on peaceful nuclear programs.

“Nuclear testing has been the symbol of the nuclear arms race for decades,” said Daryl Kimball of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, which advises governments on nuclear non-proliferation policy. “You would be eliminating a key tool of states building nuclear arsenals and turn the corner in our thinking about nuclear weapons.”

There have been more than 2,000 nuclear test explosions worldwide since the Manhattan Projects Trinity trial in July 1945. The last detonation occurred in October 2006 when a North Korean explosion was detected and confirmed by the Vienna treaty organizations more than 200 monitoring stations worldwide.

“Testing is still an essential step to demonstrate a credible nuclear weapons program,” said Rebecca Johnson, director of the London-based Verification Research, Training and Information Center. “Without the CTBT you have no chance to curb proliferation or make progress on nuclear disarmament.”

Voluntary Moratorium

The U.S. has stuck to a voluntary moratorium on testing since its last blast in September 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president. Among other nuclear powers, France staged a series of underground tests at its Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific at the beginning of Jacques Chiracs presidency in 1995. France ratified the CTBT in 1998.

“The treaty now has 180 signatories but has not entered into force because the U.S. and eight other CTBT rogue states, including China, Egypt, India, Iran and Israel, have failed to ratify,” Kimball said. Colombia, North Korea and Indonesia are the other countries with nuclear programs that have yet to ratify the treaty.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il said today he is committed to making the Korean peninsula a nuclear-free zone, Chinas state-run news agency Xinhua reported today.

Financial Crisis

At the CTBT Organization headquarters, where almost 300 people monitor daily seismic and radiation feeds from the South Pacific to Siberia, Toth and others are worried that the global financial crisis may cause Obamas administration to lose sight of its pledge.

Toth said Obamas administration should not allow the financial crisis to distract it from dealing with nuclear-weapons issues, noting that the gravest descriptions of nuclear annihilation have been adopted by economists and financiers.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett described derivatives as “weapons of mass destruction” in a February 2003 note, investment banker Felix Rohatyn has termed corporate borrowing as “nuclear finance” and the word “meltdown,” coined in the 1960s to describe a nuclear reactor accident, is routinely used to describe falling markets.

Toth would like to see Senate action on the treaty by 2010.

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