We led in concluding the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which will bring to life a decades-old dream of ending nuclear weapons testing.
The project -- which lists among its primary objectives the elimination of nuclear weapons, the elimination of nuclear weapons testing, and the creation of a new "architecture" for global security -- features among its advisors such "national security experts" as former DemocraticSenator Dick Clark, former Democratic Representative Mel Levine and former liberal RepublicanCharles Mathias.
The CTBT then, as now, does not define what it purports to ban, which is nuclear-weapons testing.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has previously said it suspects the Parchin site may be being used for nuclear weapons-related testing.
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One such challenge was whether the United States, with a military strategy based on credible nuclear deterrence, could maintain a highly reliable stockpile of nuclear weapons indefinitely without testing.
In a wide-ranging speech, she stated that she believed that the US would sign up to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which forbids the testing of nuclear weapons.
There are now only a handful of physicists still working for the government who have had first-hand experience with the design and realistic testing of nuclear weapons, and they soon will retire from government service.
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Last year, Paul Robinson, chairman emeritus of Sandia National Laboratory, testified before Congress that the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons still cannot be guaranteed without testing them, despite more than a decade of investments in technological advancements.
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Agreements are imminent on strategic arms, chemical weapons, conventional forces and nuclear testing.
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This is particularly true among the small cadre of physicists who have actually had first-hand experience with the extremely esoteric business of designing, testing and maintaining the nuclear weapons in our stockpile today -- arguably, the most complex pieces of equipment ever produced by man.
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In 1996, China pledged to refrain from further assistance to Pakistan's unsafeguarded nuclear facilities, adopted a nuclear testing moratorium, signed the comprehensive nuclear test ban and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention.
As the Center for Security Policy has noted previously, (1) the current U.S. nuclear stockpile was created on the assumption that actual weapons testing would continue to be available.
Yet seen from India, and from countries that, unlike India and Pakistan, have observed the anti-testing norm and promised to forswear nuclear weapons, a presidential visit will amount in diplomatic terms to the next best thing to general acceptance.
The most dominating "fact of life" in the U.S. nuclear weapons world today is the continued existence of a moratorium on underground nuclear testing.
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For India, as for Pakistan, that means no exporting know-how, no testing new weapons, but instead exploring ways to avoid stumbling inadvertently into nuclear war.
Without periodic, realistic testing, it is not scientifically possible to assure with high confidence that existing nuclear weapons are as safe and reliable as we know how to make them.
Yet, President Obama wants to foreclose even the replacement of your obsolescing weapons with one that promises to provide a safe and reliable deterrent in the absence of nuclear testing.
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Unfortunately, the evidence strongly suggests that such developing nations are deciding to become nuclear weapons states for reasons that have nothing to do with the status of the U.S. testing program.
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