Republicans in the House and Senate on Tuesday filed bills that would prohibit U.S. funding in support of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty if the U.N. Security Council adopts any resolution imposing binding measures on the United States regarding nuclear testing.
The Obama administration has said it is working with its fellow Security Council member states on a resolution, and an accompanying statement from the 15-member body’s five permanent members, aimed at strengthening the global moratorium on nuclear testing. Administration officials have said repeatedly the measures would be strictly nonbinding.
Congressional Republicans have been skeptical. The nearly identical bills in both chambers say “No United States funds may be made available to the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty if, on or after September 16, 2016, the United Nations Security Council adopts a resolution that obligates the United States or affirms a purported obligation of the United States to refrain from actions that would run counter to the object and purpose of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty.”
“It appears that President Obama is going to the United Nations Security Council to attempt to bind the United States to the rules of a flawed multilateral treaty that the Senate has already rejected,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who sponsored the upper chamber’s bill, said in a press release.
The United States annually provides about $32 million for the CTBTO, which operates a nuclear test monitoring system encompassing hundreds of sensor stations., according to a Sept. 8 letter from 33 GOP senators to President Barack Obama that made the same funding threat. That is about a quarter of the organization’s yearly budget, the lawmakers said.
There was no immediate response to the bills from the White House, though others were more vocal.
Cotton is “more obsessed with deterring common sense @POTUS actions on nonproliferation than deterring nuke testing by others,” Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball said on Twitter.
