ACRONYM Reports

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: The Endgame

ACRONYM Report No.9, April 1996

Background

A comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT) was first put forward in 1954 by the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, after the United Kingdom had joined the United States and Soviet Union in conducting nuclear tests. The original purpose was to end the race to acquire nuclear arms. During the 1950s, mass movements of public opinion, especially in Britain and the US, linked the atmospheric testing not only with nuclear proliferation but with health and environmental damage, after radioactive strontium was found in children's teeth. Kennedy, Khrushchev and Macmillan tried for a comprehensive ban, but couldn't agree on verification and inspections. The US was convinced that the Soviets would cheat if they could, while the Soviets suspected the US of wanting to spy. The suspicions were fuelled by a range of (as it turned out) far-fetched evasion scenarios dreamed up by a team from the US laboratories headed by Edward Teller. Caught between competing notions of what verification would be 'adequate' and what was 'bearable', the three countries settled on a Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) in 1963, which banned explosions in the atmosphere, outer space and under water. They omitted verification from the treaty altogether, instead relying on their own national technical means (NTM) to monitor the other's programmes. As the three major nuclear powers took their testing underground, France and China continued testing in the atmosphere until 1974 and 1980 respectively.

Many continued to push for a CTBT during the 1960s. The preamble of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) recalled the preambular determination in the PTBT 'to seek to achieve the discontinuance of all test explosions of nuclear weapons for all time and to continue negotiations to this end.' Bilateral negotiations between the US and USSR resulted in agreements limiting the size of an underground nuclear explosion to 150 kilotons1. The 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) and the 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty (PNET) set this limit for weapons tests and 'peaceful nuclear explosions' (PNE) respectively. Tripartite talks between the US, USSR and the UK, initiated by President Carter in 1977, foundered in 1980 when the pro-nuclear administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took power in the United States and Britain. At the Fourth Review Conference of the NPT in 1990, the non-aligned states, led by Mexico, called for a firm commitment to open negotiations on a CTBT. The nuclear weapon states' refusal prevented agreement on a final declaration.

This served notice of the importance of a test ban, as NPT parties began to prepare for 1995, when the decision on extending the Treaty would be taken. In January 1991, 118 states parties to the PTBT participated in an Amendment Conference with the purpose of adding 'underground' to the prohibited environments, which would have converted the PTBT to a comprehensive ban. This was opposed by the US, UK and USSR, partly on grounds that it would not include France and China, which were still not parties to this treaty. The Cold War was ending, with the fragmentation of the Soviet Union into smaller nation states. France and China signed the NPT in 1992. South Africa dismantled its few nuclear weapons, joined the NPT and put its nuclear facilities under the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) full-scope safeguards.

In October 1991 President Gorbachev initiated another moratorium on Soviet testing. The French President, Fran‡ois Mitterrand, followed in April 1992, giving renewed impetus to moves in the US Congress to halt testing. On October 2, 1992, President Bush signed into law a moratorium on US testing which had been attached as an amendment to FY1993 Energy and Water Appropriations Bill by Senator Mark Hatfield and others. This also instructed the President to submit a plan for achieving a multilateral ban on all nuclear weapon tests by September 30, 1996. Because the United Kingdom's tests were conducted at the Nevada Test Site under US auspices, this legislation forced a moratorium on the British government too. When Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton took over the presidencies of Russia and the US they confirmed their predecessors' moratoria.

With the objections removed, it was at last possible to agree a negotiating mandate for the Nuclear Test Ban (NTB) Committee of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva in 1993. Negotiations on a comprehensive test ban treaty opened in the CD in January 1994.

This is a summary of the CTBT negotiations from January to March 1996.