So should we, perhaps, be content with the virtual moratorium on nuclear testing?
No, because commitments that are not legally binding can easily be violated.
-- Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union and winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. These 2 sentences from Gorbachev's New York Times op-ed pithily point out the importance of treaties, on much the same reasoning as in a prior post by yours truly. Gorbachev's objective? He begins by welcoming the just-before-Christmas approval by the U.S. Senate of the New Start disarmament treaty (prior posts), which Russia's expected to ratify next month. Then he moves quickly to his main goal: secure U.S. ratification as well of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Russia and 34 others of the 44 "nuclear technology holder states" have ratified. The United States is among the holdouts, the Senate having refused to give its advice and consent in 1999. U.S. approval of CTBT would break the logjam, Gorbachev argues, and so make way for "the next step to a world free of nuclear weapons"-- a stated goal of the current American President and many who have preceded him.
