The Obama administration has not yet convincingly shown it does not intend to seek any sort of binding measure without Senate approval to promote a global prohibition on nuclear testing, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said Wednesday.
The Senate would have to ratify U.S. membership in the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which is necessary for the accord to enter into force. The administration never brought the CTBT to the upper chamber for consideration, and is instead mulling a U.N. Security Council resolution against nuclear testing.
“This is really about one thing, regardless of who’s president, regardless of who’s chairman of the committee, regardless of who is serving, and that is to ensure that the Senate plays its appropriate role as it relates to international agreements,” Corker said in his opening statement to a committee hearing on the administration’s plan. “This agreement could be about apple pie and I would be bringing this hearing together.”
In an Aug. 10 letter to Corker, Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Julia Frifield laid out the boundaries of the resolution being discussed with other Security Council states: a reaffirmation of the global moratoria on testing (which North Korea alone occasionally breaches) and for the CTBT Organization and its verification system. The administration also hopes for a political statement from the five nuclear-weapon states under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – “expressing the view that a nuclear test would defeat the object and purpose of the CTBT.”
Frifield emphasized that there is no intention to secure a legally binding prohibition on nuclear testing. Nonetheless, in an Aug. 12 letter to President Barack Obama, Corker called attention to specific language Frifield used: “’Object and purpose’ obligations for countries that have signed and not ratified a treaty are specifically articulated in Article 18 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which the United States also has not ratified; but they have been recognized by successive U.S. administrations as customary international law that present a binding restriction on the United States.”
“Some of the language had ambiguities and certainly could be interpreted to be something that creates customary international law,” Corker said Wednesday.
