[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 16] [Senate] [Pages 23696-23697] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]THE COMPREHENSIVE TEST BAN TREATY Mr. HELMS. Madam President, I was fascinated when I saw in the Washington Post this Sunday the front-page headline reading: ``CIA Unable to Precisely Track Testing: Analysis of Russian Compliance with Nuclear Treaty Hampered.'' The first paragraph of the story below that headline said it all: In a new assessment of its capabilities, the Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that it cannot monitor low- level nuclear tests by Russia precisely enough to ensure compliance with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. . . . Twice last month the Russians carried out what might have been nuclear explosions at its . . . testing site in the Arctic. But the CIA found that data from its seismic sensors and other monitoring equipment were insufficient to allow analysts to reach a firm conclusion about the nature of events, officials said. . . . This surely was devastating news for a lot of people at the White House. Our nation's Central Intelligence Agency had come to the conclusion that it cannot verify compliance with the CTBT. Mercy. I can just see them scurrying around. But more amazing than this was the response of the White House spin machine. I've seen a lot of strange things during my nearly 27 years in the Senate, but this is the first time I have ever seen an administration argue that America's inability to verify compliance with a treaty was precisely the reason for the Senate to ratify the treaty. Back home that doesn't even make good nonsense. Yet this is what the White House has been arguing all day today. This revelation is good news for the CTBT's proponents, they say, because the CTBT will now institute an entirely new verification system with 300 monitoring stations around the world. Madam President, I am not making this up. This is what the White House said. I say to the President: What excuse will the White House give if and when they spend billions of dollars on a ``new verification system with 300 monitoring stations around the world''--and the CTBT still can't be verified? Talk about a pig in a poke. Or a hundred excuse-makers still on the spot! If the Administration spokesman contends that the CTBT's proposed ``International Monitoring System,'' or IMS, will be able to do what all the assets of the entire existing U.S. intelligence community cannot--i.e., verify compliance with this treaty--isn't it really just a matter of their having been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? Let's examine their claim. The CTBT's International Monitoring System was designed only to detect what are called ``fully-coupled'' nuclear tests. That is to say tests that are not shielded from the surrounding geology. But the proposed multibillion-dollar IMS cannot detect hidden tests-- known as ``de-coupled'' tests--in which a country tries to hide the nuclear explosion by conducting the test in an underground cavern or some other structure that muffles the explosion. ``Decoupling'' can reduce the detectable magnitude of a test by a factor of 70. In other words, countries can conduct a 60-kiloton nuclear test without being detected by this fanciful IMS apparatus, a last-minute cover up for the administration's having exaggerated a treaty that should never have been sent to the U.S. Senate for approval in the first place. Every country of concern to the U.S.--every one of them--is capable of decoupling its nuclear explosions. North Korea, China, and Russia will all be able to conduct significant testing without detection by our country. What about these 300 ``additional'' monitoring sites that the White House has brought for as a illusory argument in favor of the CTBT? They are fiction. The vast majority of those 300 sites already exist. They have been United States monitoring stations all along--and the CIA nonetheless confesses that it cannot verify. The additional sites called for under the treaty are in places like the Cook Islands, the Central African Republic, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Niger, Paraguay, Bolivia, Botswana, Costa Rica, Samoa, etc. The majority of these will add zero, not one benefit to the U.S. ability to monitor countries of concern. The fact is if U.S. intelligence cannot verify compliance with this treaty, no International Monitoring System set up under the CTBT will. This treaty is unverifiable, and dangerous to U.S. national security. If this is the best the administration can do, they haven't much of a case to make to the Senate--or anywhere [[Page 23697]] else--in favor of the CTBT. The administration is grasping at straws, looking for any argument--however incredible--to support an insupportable treaty. We will let them try to make their case. As I demonstrated on the floor last week, the Foreign Relations Committee has held 14 separate hearings in which the committee heard extensive testimony from both sides on the CTBT--113 pages of testimony, from a plethora of current and former officials. This is in addition to the extensive hearings that have already been held by the Armed Services Committee and three hearings exclusively on the CTBT held by the Government Affairs Committee. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold its final hearings this Thursday to complete our examination of this treaty. We will invite Secretary Albright to make her case for the treaty, and will hear testimony from a variety of former senior administration officials and arms control experts to present the case against the treaty. I have also invited the chairman of the Senate Armed Service Committee, Senator Warner, to present the findings of his distinguished panel's review of this fatally flawed treaty. Finally, the facts are not on the administration's side. This is a ill-conceived treaty which our own Central Intelligence Agency acknowledges that it cannot verify. Approving the CTBT would leave the American people unsure of the safety and reliability of America's nuclear deterrent, while at the same time completely unprotected from ballistic missile attack. That is a dangerous proposal, and I am confident that the U.S. Senate will vote to reject this dangerous arms control pact called the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I yield the floor. ____________________