 Though
all nuclear-capable states -- the latest being India -- have declared they will not
conduct any more nuclear tests, the CTBT has yet to come into force. At the insistence of
the UK and China, the treaty included Article 14, which states that it would not come into
force till 44 designated countries had signed it. Despite its protests, India was placed
on that list. As of now, only 13 countries have ratified the treaty, the latest being the
UK and France, who did so in April. The signatories will review their options next year. The basic obligations of the CTBT are contained in Article 1 in two
clauses of just nine lines each. Each signatory agrees not to carry out any nuclear
weapons test and refrain from "causing, encouraging" them. The rest of the
191-page document details how the implementation of this treaty will be organised and how
the crucial verification system will work.
To get a sceptical US Senate to ratify the treaty, President
Bill Clinton attached a six-point package of "safeguards" to ensure the US
nuclear weapons remain ready to use forever, despite the test ban. Most important is the
"stockpile stewardship programme", which will spend over $3 billion (Rs 12,000
crore) for a National Ignition Facility -- a lab where the conditions of nuclear fusion
can be replicated by laser energy -- and $517 million (Rs 2,068 crore) for a super
computer 1,000 times faster than anything today for simulating N-tests. The US has also
continued with so-called sub-critical tests where weapons and assemblies and even fissile
material are tested in a way that there is no self-sustaining nuclear fission.
Other countries had their own "clarifications".
Germany, for instance, declared that nothing in the treaty could be interpreted to prevent
the "research into and development of controlled thermonuclear fusion ..." All
this only makes it clear, in the words of US nuclear weapons' scientist Richard L. Garwin,
that the CTBT "is not a treaty by which nuclear weapon states agree to give up their
weapons, reduce their numbers or even stop their development". Delhi's May 13
declaration that the tests generated data for computer simulations and "for attaining
the capability to carry out sub-critical experiments if considered necessary" seems
to have made it clear that India will keep up with the scientific Joneses and retain the
option to develop weapons even if it agrees to sign the CTBT.
-Manoj Joshi |
