Avoiding nuclear showdown

If world events were the only measure, the time would be right for Senate ratification of ther Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But this is politics, and the timing could not be worse.

Nuclear weapons technology is no longer the exclusive property of the seven-member nuclear club, a historically self-selective group of nations with the requisite scientific wherewithall. It is now available off the shelf. Proliferation is no longer a threat. It is reality.

But Senate consideration of the treaty is not based upon access to technology or fears about rogue states or worries about regional military adventures turning into fission expeditions. The Clinton administration made it all too clear from the start that ratification would be a major foreign-policy coup, a real legacy builder. Senate Republican leadership has not been at all shy about wanting to deny the president they detest such a victory.

Majority Leader Trent Lott, who massaged the schedule to ensure a floor debate too short to fully address the issues, has learned from bitter experience the political price paid for endorsing weapons treaties in an election cycle. He backed the Chemical Weapons Treaty in 1997 and spent as much energy appeasing his conservative critics as he did battling Democrats.

It is not by coincidence that 250,000 petitions decrying the lease of the Panama Canal (another treaty conservatives love to hate) to a Hong Kong — read Red Chinese — business were dumped on the Capitol steps just before the Senate convened Tuesday.

President Clinton deserves a hearty share of blame for this muddling of mankind’s future with politics. His many statements about the blow a Senate defeat would deal to America’s leadership role are too easily construed to mean a defeat to his leadership. The salivating over getting such an important treaty signed as his vice president hits the campaign trail has been too obvious. The hope that a Republican-controlled Senate would muster the necessary two-thirds vote to help out was simply hoping for too much.

The best hope now — unless 67 senators can agree that nuclear containment is more important than than the next election — is for the vote to be delayed until after the next election. That requires unanimous consent, no small feat in itself, but it would be far more preferable than an outright defeat. The 107 nations that have yet to ratify the treaty would not be getting the wrong message from the United States. And it would give Congress time to clear up that mess on its front steps.