The United States Senate this week voted down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. This is the first time since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 that the Senate has rejected a major international agreement. We can only hope that the results of this shortsighted move will not be as great. Still, the vote is a blow to nonproliferation hopes, to the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton and to U.S. pretensions to international leadership.
It was not even close. A treaty needs support from two-thirds of the Senate to be ratified. The final tally was 51-48 against ratification, with only four Republican senators crossing the aisle to support the pact. (One Democrat, Sen. Robert Byrd, voted present.)
Most senators opposed the CTBT for two reasons. On the one hand, they feared that the U.S. arsenal would become unreliable without testing and, as a result, would no longer deter other nations. Treaty supporters countered that reliability would be maintained through computer simulations. Alternatively, they asserted that if the U.S. was uncertain that its arsenal would work, adversaries would be equally uncertain that it would not; deterrence would be preserved.