[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 16]
[Senate]
[Pages 23696-23697]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                   THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATY

  Mr. HELMS. Madam President, I was fascinated when I saw in the 
Washington Post this Sunday the front-page headline reading: ``CIA 
Unable to Precisely Track Testing: Analysis of Russian Compliance with 
Nuclear Treaty Hampered.''
  The first paragraph of the story below that headline said it all:

       In a new assessment of its capabilities, the Central 
     Intelligence Agency has concluded that it cannot monitor low-
     level nuclear tests by Russia precisely enough to ensure 
     compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. . . . 
     Twice last month the Russians carried out what might have 
     been nuclear explosions at its . . . testing site in the 
     Arctic. But the CIA found that data from its seismic sensors 
     and other monitoring equipment were insufficient to allow 
     analysts to reach a firm conclusion about the nature of 
     events, officials said. . . . 

  This surely was devastating news for a lot of people at the White 
House. Our nation's Central Intelligence Agency had come to the 
conclusion that it cannot verify compliance with the CTBT.
  Mercy. I can just see them scurrying around.
  But more amazing than this was the response of the White House spin 
machine. I've seen a lot of strange things during my nearly 27 years in 
the Senate, but this is the first time I have ever seen an 
administration argue that America's inability to verify compliance with 
a treaty was precisely the reason for the Senate to ratify the treaty. 
Back home that doesn't even make good nonsense.
  Yet this is what the White House has been arguing all day today. This 
revelation is good news for the CTBT's proponents, they say, because 
the CTBT will now institute an entirely new verification system with 
300 monitoring stations around the world.
  Madam President, I am not making this up. This is what the White 
House said.
  I say to the President: What excuse will the White House give if and 
when they spend billions of dollars on a ``new verification system with 
300 monitoring stations around the world''--and the CTBT still can't be 
verified? Talk about a pig in a poke. Or a hundred excuse-makers still 
on the spot!
  If the Administration spokesman contends that the CTBT's proposed 
``International Monitoring System,'' or IMS, will be able to do what 
all the assets of the entire existing U.S. intelligence community 
cannot--i.e., verify compliance with this treaty--isn't it really just 
a matter of their having been caught with their hands in the cookie 
jar?
  Let's examine their claim. The CTBT's International Monitoring System 
was designed only to detect what are called ``fully-coupled'' nuclear 
tests. That is to say tests that are not shielded from the surrounding 
geology.
  But the proposed multibillion-dollar IMS cannot detect hidden tests--
known as ``de-coupled'' tests--in which a country tries to hide the 
nuclear explosion by conducting the test in an underground cavern or 
some other structure that muffles the explosion.
  ``Decoupling'' can reduce the detectable magnitude of a test by a 
factor of 70.
  In other words, countries can conduct a 60-kiloton nuclear test 
without being detected by this fanciful IMS apparatus, a last-minute 
cover up for the administration's having exaggerated a treaty that 
should never have been sent to the U.S. Senate for approval in the 
first place.
  Every country of concern to the U.S.--every one of them--is capable 
of decoupling its nuclear explosions. North Korea, China, and Russia 
will all be able to conduct significant testing without detection by 
our country.
  What about these 300 ``additional'' monitoring sites that the White 
House has brought for as a illusory argument in favor of the CTBT? They 
are fiction. The vast majority of those 300 sites already exist. They 
have been United States monitoring stations all along--and the CIA 
nonetheless confesses that it cannot verify.
  The additional sites called for under the treaty are in places like 
the Cook Islands, the Central African Republic, Fiji, the Solomon 
Islands, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Niger, Paraguay, Bolivia, Botswana, 
Costa Rica, Samoa, etc. The majority of these will add zero, not one 
benefit to the U.S. ability to monitor countries of concern. The fact 
is if U.S. intelligence cannot verify compliance with this treaty, no 
International Monitoring System set up under the CTBT will. This treaty 
is unverifiable, and dangerous to U.S. national security.
  If this is the best the administration can do, they haven't much of a 
case to make to the Senate--or anywhere

[[Page 23697]]

else--in favor of the CTBT. The administration is grasping at straws, 
looking for any argument--however incredible--to support an 
insupportable treaty.
  We will let them try to make their case. As I demonstrated on the 
floor last week, the Foreign Relations Committee has held 14 separate 
hearings in which the committee heard extensive testimony from both 
sides on the CTBT--113 pages of testimony, from a plethora of current 
and former officials. This is in addition to the extensive hearings 
that have already been held by the Armed Services Committee and three 
hearings exclusively on the CTBT held by the Government Affairs 
Committee.
  The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold its final hearings 
this Thursday to complete our examination of this treaty. We will 
invite Secretary Albright to make her case for the treaty, and will 
hear testimony from a variety of former senior administration officials 
and arms control experts to present the case against the treaty.
  I have also invited the chairman of the Senate Armed Service 
Committee, Senator Warner, to present the findings of his distinguished 
panel's review of this fatally flawed treaty.
  Finally, the facts are not on the administration's side. This is a 
ill-conceived treaty which our own Central Intelligence Agency 
acknowledges that it cannot verify. Approving the CTBT would leave the 
American people unsure of the safety and reliability of America's 
nuclear deterrent, while at the same time completely unprotected from 
ballistic missile attack. That is a dangerous proposal, and I am 
confident that the U.S. Senate will vote to reject this dangerous arms 
control pact called the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
  I yield the floor.

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