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Senate vote undermines US prestige

The United States Senate's vote against ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a top foreign policy goal for President Bill Clinton, was seen by its supporters as a devastating blow to American prestige.

''Our authority to set the norms in the international system has been seriously compromised,'' said Laurence Korb, now with the Council on Foreign Relations and once an assistant secretary of state in the 1980s under then president Ronald Reagan.

''We no longer have the standing to tell China, or Pakistan or any other country: don't test another nuclear weapon,'' Senator Carl Levin of Michigan said in the Senate debate.

Significantly, the vote fell the day after a coup in Pakistan raised concern of more instability in a country that Washington has been coaxing toward signing the treaty after it exploded a nuclear device last year.

The defeat was also likely to undermine the authority of Clinton, struggling with the 'lame duck' tag in the last 15 months of his presidency, and wipe out at a stroke what he hoped would be a key legacy -- progress on nuclear non-proliferation.

Republican opponents rejected cataclysmic warnings about the effect of their vote, saying the treaty was unverifiable and would have undermined US ability to maintain the supremacy of its nuclear armoury.

''The founding fathers never envisioned the Senate would be a rubber stamp for a flawed treaty,'' declared Senate majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.

In a study for the conservative Cato Institute, Kathleen Bailey, a former arms control and disarmament agency official, said if the Senate ratified the CTBT it would ''foreclose America's ability to modernise its nuclear forces.''

She said, ''But other nations have a history of non-compliance with arms-control treaties. Thus the limited political benefits of the CTBT are not worth the high cost to America's national security.''

It was hard to find a dispassionate analyst of the issue in Washington, which is embroiled in partisan politics a year before a presidential election and where bitterness surrounding last year's impeachment battle against Clinton still lingers.

Still, there were many, especially in the diplomatic community, who agreed with an open letter from the leaders of Britain, France and Germany last week saying failure on the part of the US to ratify would only encourage nuclear proliferation.

Clinton had argued that Republican opponents, who mustered 51 votes in the 100-seat chamber when a two-thirds majority was needed to ratify, ''run the risk of putting America on the wrong side of the proliferation issue for the first time in 50 years.''

Spurgeon Keeny, president of the independent Arms Control Association, said, ''The United States took the lead in the 1995 indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Partly why we managed to get consensus was to persuade nuclear states to move toward reductions and states to move toward a test ban treaty,'' he said.

Keeny noted that the NPT was up for a five-year review next April. ''It won't be China, Russia or India that is the party being criticised by more than just a few countries. It will be the United States,'' he said.

UNI

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