Playing Politics With Nuclear Test Ban

by Molly Ivins

Except it doesn't happen the very next day. Anyone watching the Senate leadership's refusal to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would have concluded the Republicans are fools, but to have that conclusion abruptly reinforced by the military coup in Pakistan is almost too pat. History normally takes a little longer to make these points.

Pakistan, you recall, conducted its first nuclear test in May 1998, along with its perennial enemy India. Although we don't yet know that having the Pakistani military oust the democratically elected government will make tensions on the subcontinent worse, it's a safe assumption.

The litany of pointless regret -- coulda, woulda, shoulda -- comes sharply into play. The United States joined with 153 other countries three years ago in signing the treaty, which bans atmospheric and underground nuclear testing. Before it can take effect, it must be ratified by the world's 44 countries capable of producing nuclear weapons.

So far, only 26 have signed it, with the others holding off until the United States acts -- including Pakistan and India.

The political play on this is a little complicated. Ratification requires a two-thirds vote by the Senate. The Republicans are unwilling to sign the treaty, so Clinton's best play has been to prevent the thing from being defeated.

Trent Lott, Senate majority leader, scheduled a vote on the long-back-burnered treaty with two days' notice and one day of hearings. To stop the treaty from being voted on, the 45 Senate Democrats needed at least six Republican votes.

Lott and Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wanted a written request from Clinton formally asking that a vote on the treaty be postponed and a promise that he would not bring it up again during his presidency. The only point of this gambit was to make Clinton crawl.

A nuclear test ban treaty was first proposed by President Eisenhower. It has been endorsed by the entire scientific establishment, including 32 Nobel Prize winners. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the heads of our weapons labs have also endorsed it. The prime ministers of Germany, France and Great Britain took the extraordinary step of urging the United States to ratify the treaty in an opinion piece published in The New York Times.

Yet the leaders of the Senate are so blinded by their hatred of Clinton that they couldn't pass up a chance to mess with him. It's pure payback, since he once again has Congress in a box on the budget. But it's one thing to mess with Clinton over the size of the highway bill; it's another thing to mess around with nuclear war.

To justify their petty partisan maneuvering on this, of all subjects, Senate Republicans are claiming that the treaty can't be verified.

"Trust but verify," they say, smugly quoting Ronald Reagan.

The best chance we'll ever get to verify other countries' testing is this treaty. In a perfectly circular round of logic, Republicans point to North Korea's surprise launch of a three-stage ballistic missile last year. According to Robert M. Gates, director of the CIA under Big George Bush, the Korean test "highlights how hard it is even with our remarkable intelligence capabilities to track these diverse emerging threats accurately."

Yep. That's why having several hundred sensors placed around the world would be so useful. As our teen-agers say in these situations, "Duh."

It is possible that even the several hundred sensors, of the kind used to track earthquakes, would miss a low-yield underground test. But the treaty also sets up on-site inspections and leaves the United States a loophole to test its own weapons should our weapons-meisters decide that it is absolutely necessary to do so.

Tom Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, wrote: "The Republican Party has drifted toward a sort of know-nothing 'drive-by' foreign policy. Its members drive by the White House, shout some put-down of President Clinton, demand more money for a missile shield and drive on. Their only interest is in defeating the president, not defining a policy."

Aside from the fact that the stakes here are really quite high, one would think the Republicans would have noticed by now that letting Clinton-hatred set their agenda has been a political disaster for them, as well as a policy disaster for the country.

Setting aside the entire Lewinsky fiasco, time after time we see the Republicans reacting to Clinton with if-he-says-yes, I-say-no. Clinton, who is nobody's political fool, is using this folly to his own advantage. The amazing thing about Clinton, that arch-compromiser, is that he keeps looking for a way to deal with these folks.

To point out the obvious, our biggest security concern is not whether we have enough nukes. We have enough nukes. It is to stop Russia's nukes from being spread from hither to yon. Our greatest security interest is in keeping track of other folks' nukes.

The test ban treaty is a sensible step in doing so. And it is quite a bit more urgent today than it was yesterday.