On the sixteenth anniversary of the first signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a panel of nuclear test monitoring experts yesterday emphasized that advances in technology in recent years have addressed many of the technical obstacles to ratifying the treaty in the United States. “Technical issues, yes, have been favorably resolved,” Richard Garwin, who was on the National Research Council’s committee on technical issues related to the CTBT, told NW&M Monitor on the sidelines of the event held by the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Capitol Hill. He added, “A hardheaded assessment says, in my personal judgement, that the CTBT would be good for us to ratify and certainly if we ratify it China would. We would be in a much wider and better position to hold other countries, not just to the CTBT, but to the nonproliferation treaty.”
The quality and number of seismic monitoring equipment and radionuclide detectors around the globe have increased dramatically in the last decade, according to a recently released report by the National Research Council on CTBT technical issues that updates a 2002 study. Detection capability is expected to continue to improve, and Garwin said that should not be an obstacle to U.S. ratification of the treaty. “Can we maintain our own nuclear weapons safe, secure and reliable under the CTBT? our independent answer is yes,” he said. “But the other aspect is, would we detect other people testing?” While some very low-yield tests may not be detected with current technology, states looking to covertly test nuclear weapons could “do a lot better without a CTBT, so that point is really moot,” Garwin added.
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