Learning from the 1999 Vote on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Part 2

This article is re-printed with permission of the author.

The record of the CTBT in the Senate from 1997 to October 1999 suggests that the October 13 vote was not simply “about the substance of the treaty,” as then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) claimed in a press conference after the vote and as Senate opponents such as Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) claim today. In fact, the “no” vote had less to do with the substantive issues and was more a consequence of the political miscalculations of treaty proponents; the failure of many senators to explore and understand core issues; the deep, partisan divisions in the nation’s capital; and the president’s failure to organize a strong, focused, and sustained campaign for the treaty.

Following Clinton’s transmittal of the CTBT to the Senate in September 1997, treaty opponents initially pursued a blocking strategy. They were well positioned to pursue such a strategy. Treaty approval requires a two-thirds majority, so opponents of a treaty need to muster only 34 votes. In addition, as members of the majority party at the time, they were able to exercise a great deal of control over the Senate calendar.

In January 1998, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) announced that he would not hold hearings on the CTBT “until the administration has submitted the ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty] protocols and the Kyoto global-warming treaty.” The delaying strategy stifled debate and led many proponents and opponents to postpone preparations for the CTBT debate because they believed that the Republican Senate leadership would not agree to schedule time for debate and a vote.

In the early weeks of 1998, the Clinton administration made repeated statements supporting the CTBT and urging timely Senate consideration of the treaty. The administration also secured valuable support for the treaty from four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the directors of the nuclear weapons laboratories, and the members of NATO, but it failed to build on the strong base of expert and public support for the CTBT and to take the case for the treaty directly to the Senate.

In January 1998, national security adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger called the CTBT “one of the president’s top priorities,” but the administration had other concerns to which it gave precedence. Domestically, the White House was keen to pursue several policy objectives in the run-up to the midterm elections, and Helms’ “hostage-taking” strategy had raised the political cost of pushing for the CTBT.

For its part, the administration’s national security team was preoccupied with securing Senate approval for NATO expansion. Instead of appointing a coordinator to build CTBT support, national security officials relied on the possibility that Russia would ratify START II, thus enabling them to send the ABM Treaty and START II protocols to the Senate for consideration and breaking Helms’ stranglehold on the CTBT.

However, the Duma did not ratify START II, and other crises emerged. Through the first half of 1999, the CTBT remained on the political back burner as the Clinton administration and Congress were immobilized by the impeachment hearings and trial related to the Monica Lewinsky affair and soon after by NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia and charges of espionage at the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories.

Following the end of hostilities in the Balkans in the late spring of 1999, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and pro-treaty nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) redoubled their efforts to raise attention to the plight of the CTBT and to press the Senate leadership to begin the process of considering the treaty.

On July 20, a bipartisan group of nine senators held a press briefing, citing overwhelming public support for the treaty and calling for prompt Senate action. That same day, all 45 Democratic senators wrote to Lott, asking for “all necessary hearings…to report the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for timely consideration” before the October 1999 international conference on CTBT entry into force. In a separate letter, Republican Senators Arlen Specter (Pa.) and Jim Jeffords (Vt.) also urged the Senate leadership to begin the process of CTBT consideration.

As he had done for nearly two years, Helms rebuffed his Senate colleagues, sarcastically writing to Dorgan, “Inasmuch as you are clearly concerned about the need for swift Senate action on treaties, perhaps I can enlist your support in respectfully suggesting that you write to the President urging that he submit the ABM Protocols and the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate? I will be very interested in any response you receive from him.” The Raleigh News & Observer characterized Helms’ letter as a “playful response to supporters of the treaty [that] underscores his failure to take any of those concerns seriously. That’s a very unbecoming and dangerous attitude to have toward the serious problem of nuclear proliferation.” The exchange simply reinforced attitudes on both sides.

Nongovernmental CTBT advocates accelerated their public education and
Senate lobbying efforts. They encouraged concerned citizens to call their senators about the treaty, pushed newspapers to editorialize on the topic, and collected support from former military and government officials, independent nuclear weapons scientists, and hundreds of public interest organizations.

By late August 1999, news reports suggested that the White House and Senate Democrats were preparing for a pitched battle and were threatening to bring the Senate to a standstill unless Republicans agreed to hold hearings on the CTBT. The renewed effort by CTBT proponents to jump-start Senate consideration of the treaty appeared to be all the more credible to CTBT opponents because of the appearance of White House-led coordination. In reality, most in the Clinton administration remained dubious about the prospect of real action on the treaty, and little more was done to build support.

Through August and September, treaty opponents responded by accelerating preparations for a possible vote on final passage. James Schlesinger, who once headed the Defense and Energy departments, and Kyl, in consultation with Lott, stepped up their lobbying efforts, which were aimed at uncommitted Republican senators. In addition, a number of prominent former national security officials were urged to voice their opposition. At the same time, Lott continued to try to prevent the scheduling of a vote. He told Dorgan and other Senate treaty supporters that he would speak with Helms about allowing hearings but that “this is a dangerous time to rush to judgment on such an important issue…. If it is called up preemptively, without appropriate consideration and thought, it could be defeated.” Lott would soon propose a schedule that allowed less than five working days for consideration of the treaty.

In late September, apparently without information about the opposition’s quiet lobbying effort, Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.), along with other leading Senate CTBT proponents and the White House, decided to try to advance the issue by introducing a nonbinding Senate resolution that called for beginning the process to consider the CTBT and scheduling a vote on the treaty by March 31, 2000. The plan to press for the resolution, which was never introduced, was agreed to at a meeting between Berger and the Senate Democratic leadership on the evening of September 22. At the meeting, participants weighed the possibility that Lott might try to schedule a vote on the treaty on short notice, but they considered the possibility low and decided to press forward.

On September 29, having been informed of the Democrats’ intention to introduce their resolution, Helms and Lott abandoned their blocking strategy and proposed a vote on final passage of the treaty by October 7. Lott calculated that the Democrats might not agree to his terms for a truncated debate and that even if they did, he could assemble the votes needed to block ratification. According to Kyl, 34 senators had been persuaded to vote against ratification by September 14.

Indeed, Lott’s initial proposal for 10 hours of debate on the treaty with only six days’ notice was not accepted by the Democratic leadership. Some Senate supporters, the White House, and the NGO community criticized the offer, calling it a “rush to judgment” because it did not provide sufficient time for hearings and a thorough and informed debate. In consultation with the White House, Senate Democratic leaders negotiated for more time and a more thorough series of hearings. On October 1, however, they decided to accept Lott’s final “take it or leave it” counteroffer for a vote as soon as October 12.

The decision to accept the offer was apparently motivated in part by the belief that the negative effect of continued inaction on the treaty could be as severe as outright defeat. It was very likely that if a vote were not scheduled before the end of 1999, and therefore before the 2000 election season, the treaty would not come before the Foreign Relations Committee and then the full Senate until the middle of 2001 or later. As Biden said on October 2, “The question is: If you are going to die, do you want to die with no one knowing who shot you, or do you want to go at least with the world knowing who killed you?”

With the final vote on the CTBT just days away, Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen finally launched a high-profile, high-powered effort to win Senate support for the treaty. The White House highlighted the fact that the CTBT enjoyed the overwhelming support of U.S. military leaders, as well as leading weapons scientists and seismological experts. Clinton met with several undecided senators at the White House, while Cohen and Albright lobbied undecided senators and worked to communicate the importance of the issue through the news media.

Treaty supporters had recognized from the beginning of their campaign that they would need the support of several influential “internationalist” Republicans to win over the large bloc of undecided votes. Yet, over the course of 1998 and 1999, proponents had made little headway, as most senators ignored the issue and the administration did next to nothing to engage them on issues relating to the treaty.

By the end of October 8, the first day of Senate floor debate, the most crucial of these Republican senators—John Warner (Va.), Pete Domenici (N.M.), Richard Lugar (Ind.), and Chuck Hagel (Neb.)—as well as other Republican moderates, had declared their intention to vote against the treaty.

As important as their support might have been, the debate was effectively over before the administration’s CTBT effort moved into high gear during the week of October 4 and the conclusion of hearings on the treaty on October 7. The CTBT’s opponents, led by Helms and Kyl, had already lined up more than 34 “no” votes. The eleventh-hour efforts of the White House were simply too little too late.

Read the final part of Daryl Kimball's article next Friday.

Daryl G. Kimball has served as executive director of the Arms Control
Association since 2001. He previously was security programs director
for Physicians for Social Responsibility, where he helped lobby for the
U.S.
nuclear test moratorium legislation of 1992 and negotiation of a
zero-yield Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Kimball was also
executive director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, where he
led a group of nongovernmental organizations in their efforts to win
support for U.S. CTBT ratification.