Achieving this would be a difficult diplomatic effort, but it is possible. To fully enter force, the CTBT also must be signed by seven nations - China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan - aside from the United States. These excuses would lose their power after ratification, with future actions against those nations’ international commitments subject to pushback through the full power of the nearly 200 CTBT signatories marshaled by the United States. After all, they can easily point to the United States’s refusal to accede to the treaty as proof of the validity of their own actions. Currently, nations such as Russia - which is party to the CTBT - face little substantial backlash for their detonations. While these are compelling reasons alone, ratification would allow the newly-empowered CTBT and its accompanying oversight organization to benefit from the consent of the world’s most powerful government in creating an international norm against nuclear testing. However, it also has come with an unseen price tag - cancer clusters among “downwinders” living in the American Southwest and Marshall Islands, miscarriages and congenital conditions in the children of those near test sites, and environmental contamination from the release of radioactive chemicals into the atmosphere. There is, of course, the obvious monetary figure associated with planning, building and executing a nuclear detonation. Today, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s use of fusion experimentation and supercomputer-aided simulations guarantees a level of reliability for every part of the nuclear arsenal that likely surpasses what could be gained through detonations.Įven if it does allow for some additional data collection, testing carries immense costs.

With the technology of 1999, that may well have been the case. That vote, which failed to achieve the required two-thirds majority, was taken when the stability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile was thought to rely upon constant testing. This starts with rectifying the misconceptions that led to the treaty’s 1999 failure in the Senate. There is only one option to hem in the dangerous proliferation of nuclear weapons that has led nations such as Iran and North Korea to the precipice of nuclear power: Ratify the CTBT and ensure it enters into force. The resulting void created by this lack of leadership threatens to overturn a decades-long period of relative nuclear peace.

government to accede to a document that it negotiated. The anniversary, ordinarily a time to celebrate the careful diplomacy that led to such an achievement, was tempered by the continued refusal of the U.S. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) - the international agreement governing use of nuclear weapons - turned 25 in September.

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