July 26, 1973
Page 26079
COMPREHENSIVE NUCLEAR TEST BAN TREATY
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, 10 years ago the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain agreed to a limited nuclear test ban. In the preamble to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the signatories explicitly agreed to seek "to achieve the discontinuance of all test explosions of nuclear weapons for all time." This commitment to work toward a comprehensive test ban was restated in 1968 in the preamble to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And President Nixon explicitly reaffirmed America's commitment to this goal in March 1969, when, in a message to Ambassador Gerard Smith of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, he stated:
The United States supports the conclusion of a comprehensive test ban adequately verified. In view of the fact that differences regarding verification have not permitted achievement of this key arms control measure, efforts must be made toward greater understanding of the verification issue.
For the last 3 years, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Arms Control of the Foreign Relations Committee, I have held hearings on a comprehensive test ban treaty. For 3 years, administration witnesses have testified in support of such a treaty, but have insisted that before concluding a CTB Treaty, this country must receive assurances about inspecting the site of unidentified seismic events.
In the last decade there have been sufficient seismological advances to achieve the necessary verification of nuclear tests through available national means of inspection. At the present time our national seismological capabilities have advanced to a point where the nuclear tests that might escape detection and identification would be quite small and strategically insignificant. It is clear that those who continue to insist on verification through onsite inspection are really those who oppose concluding a treaty to end all nuclear testing.
Mr. President, the necessity of concluding a comprehensive nuclear test treaty in order to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear nations is increasingly urgent. Recent French and Chinese nuclear tests sorely underscore this point. Because of the SALT treaty limiting ABM deployment, there is no longer a need for more advanced strategic defensive weapons.
Improvement can be made in non-nuclear technology as national security needs dictate. And there is no prospect now of a dramatic breakthrough in nuclear technology that would give either this country or the Soviet Union a dramatic and decisive advantage over the other.
In late June of this year, the Foreign Relations Committee passed by 14 to 1, Senate Resolution 67, of which I am a cosponsor. This legislation proposes an immediate suspension of underground nuclear testing to remain in effect so long as the Soviet Union abstains and urges our Government to set forth promptly a new proposal to the Soviet Government for a permanent treaty to ban all nuclear testing. This resolution should be coming to the floor shortly. It merits the full support of the Senate.
Mr. President, the time for talking about the conclusion of a comprehensive test ban treaty has long passed. Now is the time for action.
I ask unanimous consent at this time to have printed in the RECORD an editorial on this subject from yesterday's New York Times.
There being no objection, the editorial was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows
AN END TO NUCLEAR TESTS?
Exactly ten years ago today, representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain initialed the Treaty of Moscow, the partial atomic test-ban accord that took the first giant step toward taming the threat of massive nuclear death and destruction. The widespread hope then was that the two defects of the Moscow Treaty would soon be rectified.
The first of these defects was that the treaty banned only nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, on the surface of the ground and under water, thus implicitly legitimizing underground test blasts. The second defect was that only three states originally subscribed to the treaty. Even then, a decade ago, it was evident that the need was for universal agreement to prohibit nuclear tests of every type in every conceivable environment.
These past two months have given vivid evidence that the original weaknesses in the Treaty of Moscow have not yet been cured, although most nations have by this time become signatories.
Last Sunday the Atomic Energy Commission detected a Soviet nuclear blast in Kazakhstan, apparently the third such explosion this year. A few weeks earlier, the United States held its sixth nuclear test of 1973. These were underground tests that spewed a minimum or even zero amount of radioactivity into the air; and they were, at least, not forbidden by treaty. However, the Chinese detonated a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere above Sinkiang on June 27, and France – in defiance of the International Court of Justice – carried out an atmospheric nuclear test at Mururoa in the South Pacific only last Saturday.
Even underground nuclear tests no longer have real justification. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have more than enough nuclear weapons to devastate the world, and they have been testing so long that at most they can be gaining only marginal increases of knowledge. At this late date the old arguments about the need for on-site inspection seem irrelevant as barriers to a universal halt. If Moscow and Washington want really to demonstrate that the proclaimed Soviet- American detente is genuine, they have no simpler or more effective means than to announce they are amending the 1963 Moscow Treaty to ban all nuclear tests.
France and China are even more offensive to the world sense of decency and the growing world concern for the environment by their unique and stubborn persistence in radioactive defilement of the atmosphere. France is now receiving the bulk of articulated world protests, but it should not be overlooked that the Chinese People's Republic is at least as guilty as France in putting nationalistic egotism ahead of a sense of world responsibility. Chinese-originated radioactivity is no more welcome in the lungs and bloodstreams of the mass of humanity than French-originated radioactivity.
In the case of Peking and Paris, too, it is difficult to agree that there is any legitimate self-defense case for continued nuclear testing. So far as the weapons themselves go, both China and France already have substantial enough nuclear armories to give any potential attackers serious pause, and certainly fear of nuclear retaliation for an atomic or hydrogen first strike.
There is probably less imminently serious international tension now than at any time since the partial nuclear test-ban treaty was accepted. It could even be the moment to try to make the incomplete Treaty of Moscow whole, to end all nuclear tests by all nations for all time.