EX-US SEC STATE URGES REPUBLICANS TO BACK TEST BAN

By Charles J. Hanley
AP
April 17, 2009


ROME - His fellow U.S. Republicans may have been right to vote down the nuclear test-ban treaty a decade ago, but they'd be wrong to scuttle it again as President Barack Obama pushes for Senate ratification, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz said Friday.

"They don't have to say they changed their mind," Shultz told a news conference. "They can say there's new evidence that we have, and on the basis of new evidence" they can support it.

Shultz and former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev met with reporters at the end of a two-day conference dedicated to the goal of abolishing the world's nuclear arsenals. Some 100 former and current political, diplomatic, intellectual and other leaders had gathered under the sponsorship of the Italian Foreign Ministry, the U.S.-based group Nuclear Threat Initiative and Gorbachev's World Political Forum.

Gorbachev sounded optimistic for the abolitionist cause.

"I will probably not reach the top of the mountain, but I can see it," the 78-year-old ex-Kremlin chief told the conferees. "I am sure as we go forward we will gain more support and more supporters."

Concluding the conference, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said entry into force of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) would be a first step toward bolstering nuclear disarmament.

A 1963 treaty bans nuclear tests in the atmosphere, oceans and space, but the CTBT would ban all nuclear weapons tests everywhere, including underground, both as a step toward disarmament and to block weapons proliferation.

In 1999, the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate rejected the pact almost entirely along party lines, voting 48 in favor and 51 against. Approval requires a two-thirds majority.

Opponents objected that the treaty's monitoring system couldn't detect a cheater's small underground nuclear test, and that the soundness of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would come under question if tests could not be conducted.

Asked about the 1999 vote, Shultz, President Ronald Reagan's secretary of state in 1982-89, said his fellow Republicans "might have been right voting against it some years ago, but they would be right voting for it now, based on these new facts."

The facts cited by Shultz included the development in the past decade of a vast global monitoring system of seismic and other technologies dedicated to detecting even small clandestine nuclear tests, in the interest of enforcing the treaty if it takes effect.

"There is such a system now," Shultz said. "It detected the North Korean nuclear test" - North Korea's small nuclear blast of 2006.

As for the soundness of the U.S. arsenal, Shultz noted that American nuclear weapons laboratories have since 1999 instituted an annual certification of the safety, security and stability of U.S. warheads without testing.

"These are new pieces of information that are very important and that should be made available to the Senate," he said.

In a major speech April 5 on nuclear issues, President Obama said he aimed to "immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty."

The U.S. is one of nine nuclear-capable nations whose ratification is still required for the treaty to take effect. The others are China, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran and Israel. Otherwise, 180 nations have signed the treaty and 148 have ratified it, including nuclear weapons powers Russia , Britain and France.

Obama's Democrats now control the Senate by a thin margin. Analysts believe the Democrats would need at least eight Republican allies in support of the treaty for it to win ratification.