(Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty)
MY REPLY:
In answer to your question, What’s a “fair” CTBT?”, a fair CTBT
would forbid laboratory testing of nuclear weapons and sub-critical underground
tests where plutonium is blown up with high explosives to help in designing and
improving nuclear weapons even though there’s no chain reaction. The US
has done 26 of them since we signed the treaty and Russia does them at Novaya
Zemlya. The US has been modernizing and designing new nuclear weapons,
regardless of the CTBT. I’m not sure about China.
France closed its test site but it and the UK do laboratory tests
on nuclear designs. So the original P-5 have a technological
advantage over the new members of the nuclear club and that’s the reason that
India gave when it blocked consensus in the Committee on Disarmament when the
test ban was negotiated. India’s Ambassador Ghosh argued at that time
that if the CTBT didn’t forbid laboratory testing and other advanced technology
India would vote against it. Amazingly, for the first time in
history, Ambassador Richard Butler of Australia brought the treaty to the UN
for signature, breaking all precedent by acting without consensus.
Shortly thereafter, India did its underground nuclear tests, swiftly followed
by Pakistan. (India quietly acquired the bomb in 1974 or so, but did not
want to be left behind in the high-tech race for bigger and better bombs.) The
US plans to spend one trillion dollars over the next 30 years to build two new
bomb factories, new planes, missiles and submarines to deliver their lethal
payloads, and to keep the immoral nuclear weapons complex up and
running!
Astonishingly, the CD is looking to break consensus again for
only the second time in history, rather than let Pakistan block the
negotiations on a treaty to cut off fissile material production for weapons
purposes!! Yet when the US was the only country to block consensus in the CD on
beginning negotiations on a treaty to ban weapons in space, proposed for
several years by Russia and China, no one threatened to override consensus to
bring it to the General Assembly for negotiation as was done with the CTBT and
as nations are threatening to do with the FMCT. It’s time to give
the old colonial boys network a taste of their own medicine and disregard
consensus and bring the space treaty to the UN for negotiations.
And everyone should be calling for nuclear disarmament and a total halt to the
new weapons development going on despite the CTBT, the NPT. Indeed, I hope
India and Pakistan will come to the nuclear disarmament meeting hosted by
Mexico on the humanitarian consequences of nuclear war, just as they were the
only nuclear weapons states to attend the Oslo meeting last year.
Let’s hope we can come out of Mexico this year with a mandate to
negotiate a treaty to ban the bomb, followed by a nuclear weapons convention to
provide for their total elimination. Let’s give the earth a
Valentine in Mexico on February 14th. Let’s tell Mother
Earth we love her and come out of that meeting with worldwide call to our
governments to abolish nuclear weapons. Perhaps Asia will lead the
way!!
FOR INFO ABOUT MEXICO AND HOW TO GET YOUR GOVERNMENT TO GO, SEE: