Hill Split on CTBTO Funding

The House and Senate are at odds over the Bush administration’s proposal to cut funds that would go to the preparatory commission of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), the international group tasked with eventually verifying the treaty banning nuclear-weapon tests. The Senate July 20 restored $5 million of the Bush administration’s proposed cuts. The House backed the administration’s $14.4 million budget request, requiring the issue to be resolved by a House-Senate conference committee in the coming weeks.

The cuts would primarily affect the CTBTO’s International Monitoring System (IMS), a global network of monitoring stations intended to detect nuclear explosions anywhere in the world. The United States has supported the work of the preparatory commission since it began operations in 1997. The IMS is intended to help monitor and verify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), should it become international law.

The treaty has not yet entered into force because 11 states, including the United States, have failed to ratify it. The Bush administration is opposed to ratification of the CTBT; the U.S. Senate rejected the pact in 1999. (See ACT, October 2004.) In August 2001, the administration decided not to fund the CTBTO’s inspection-related activities.
Nonetheless, the administration has continued to support funding for the IMS. For fiscal year 2005, the administration requested and the House and Senate approved $19 million in funding for the commission.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February that the lower funding requested this year “does not signal a change in U.S. policy toward the [CTBT].… Unfortunately, budgets are tight and cuts had to be made, even among programs supported by the administration.”

The CTBTO had asked the United States to contribute $22 million for fiscal year 2006. But lawmakers had anticipated that the administration would not seek the full CTBTO assessment because about $3 million would have gone toward on-site inspection-related activities.

In response to the proposed budget cuts, the Senate approved an amendment by the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and ranking member Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), to appropriate an additional $5 million to the CTBTO. In introducing the amendment on the Senate floor July 20, Biden said that “[o]ne major way to deter countries from conducting nuclear weapons tests is to ensure that such a test would be detected.”
Meanwhile, on June 7 the Organization of American States General Assembly adopted a resolution endorsing the CTBT and urging all states in the hemisphere to sign and ratify it, particularly those who are required to do so before the treaty enters into force. The resolution also includes a footnote that “the [United States] does not support the CTBT and will not become a party to it.”

In September the United Nations will host the 2005 Conference on Facilitating the Entry into Force of the CTBT. The purpose of this conference, the fourth such meeting, will be to decide on measures to accelerate the ratification process.