Weeks after forging President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz are eager to move on to a daunting new challenge: persuading the Senate to reconsider the nuclear test ban treaty that it rejected in 1999, reported Politico.
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 US doesn’t even need to conduct test explosions of its nuclear arsenal — something it hasn’t 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.
“Let’s do it,” Kerry told Moniz after they’d 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.
“Let’s get the conversation going,” Moniz agreed, while tossing in a reference to upcoming climate talks in France. “Let’s go to Paris and then we’ll 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 Republican Senator Tom Cotton (Arkansas) denounced the treaty as “flawed and unwise” and called the duo’s effort “almost comical.”
One of the fiercest critics of Obama’s 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 US 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 US, the argument goes, agreeing to another pact in which Moscow plays a central role would be dangerous.
The international negotiations that led to the test ban treaty 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 US.
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.
The US 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.
