October 6, 1999
Both Parties Seek Graceful Way to Put Off Nuclear Treaty Vote
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By ERIC SCHMITT
ASHINGTON -- With both sides acknowledging that the Senate would soundly reject a landmark treaty banning underground nuclear testing, Democrats and Republicans Tuesday each sought a face-saving way to put off a vote and declare victory.
Lawmakers from both parties expressed concern that defeating the pact, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, would be an embarrassing diplomatic setback, sending the wrong message to emerging nuclear powers like India and Pakistan that are closely watching the Senate's action.
Senator Pete Domenici, a senior Republican from New Mexico who opposes the treaty, said he would ask Clinton at a private White House dinner tonight to shelve the accord rather than have it rejected. "There are international ramifications for killing it," he said.
Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, a top Democratic supporter of the test ban, said withdrawing the treaty now would achieve the Democrats' goal of holding hearings on a treaty that has been bottled up in the Foreign Relations Committee for more than two years, and allow backers to "live to fight another day."
But both sides sought to avoid being seen as caving in to pressure. The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, and his Democratic counterpart, Thomas A. Daschle, took to the Senate floor tonight to tamp down rumors within their ranks and to announce that top aides were working to negotiate a graceful way out.
The initial results were not encouraging. Lott, who as majority leader controls what matters may come to the floor, demanded that President Clinton request that the treaty be withdrawn, and that Democrats wait until after the 2000 elections to bring up the treaty with a new Congress and new Administration. Daschle's aides and White House officials immediately rejected that offer and ratcheted up the brinkmanship that has consumed one of Clinton's top foreign policy goals.
"The President has not requested the treaty be withdrawn," said David C. Leavy, a spokesman for the National Security Council. "This deal may not get done, so we're moving full steam ahead."
But the White House's confidence smacked of false bravado. Biden said today that he had told Clinton that treaty supporters were well short of the two-thirds majority required by the Constitution to ratify the pact. All 45 Democrats are likely to vote for the treaty, but only two Republicans publicly support it. Opponents say they have more than 40 firm votes against the treaty, surpassing the 34 needed to kill it.
Despite these odds, Clinton and his top national security aides lobbied for a second straight day for a treaty that supporters say will curb the development of advanced nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen called undecided Republicans. The President's national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, talked strategy with Senate Democrats at their weekly policy lunch.
"If the Senate rejects the treaty, we run a far greater risk that nuclear arsenals will grow and weapons will spread to volatile regions, to dangerous rulers, even to terrorists," Clinton told reporters.
Sentiments on Capitol Hill shifted on the first day of hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a week before the Senate is scheduled to vote on what Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, said would be "one of the most important votes we'll ever cast."
Arms control experts from the Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Energy testified in a closed session about the problems of verifying low-level nuclear explosions under the treaty, which has been signed by more than 150 countries. The Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Gen. John Gordon of the Air Force, gave a classified briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee on similar issues.
Military officials are to testify on Wednesday and Secretary Albright on Thursday. Opponents say the treaty provisions cannot be adequately verified, and would undermine the nation's ability to insure the reliability of its nuclear arsenal. The United States stopped nuclear testing in 1992, and now maintains its weapons with a $4.5 billion annual program that uses nonnuclear explosive experiments, including sophisticated computer models.
Critics Tuesday released a letter from the former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole, who called the treaty "an ill-conceived and misguided arms control agreement."
A spokesman for Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, said Bush supports the current testing moratorium but opposes a permanent ban on nuclear testing. "He's concerned that the treaty is not verifiable and will not stop countries that pose real threats, like North Korea and Iran," said the spokesman, Scott McClellan.
In the last few weeks, Senate critics have quietly lined up a stable of national security experts who opposed the treaty to advise Senate Republicans. The experts included former Defense Secretaries Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld; a former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft; and two former Directors of Central Intelligence under Clinton, R. James Woolsey Jr. and John Deutch.
The Senate, after more than two years of delay, last week abruptly scheduled the treaty vote for Oct. 12 or 13. The scheduled vote was prompted after Democrats threatened to tie up legislative business on the Senate floor and Republicans called their bluff, knowing that they had the votes to defeat the treaty. The gravity of the issue seemed to be sinking in today, especially for a small group of undecided Republican moderates on foreign policy like Hagel, Robert F. Bennett of Utah, and Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine.
Hagel urged that the vote be postponed, at least for the year, saying that "the issue has become captive to partisan politics." Bennett said he was torn between the treaty's geopolitical merits and its flawed provisions.
Lott said he had balanced those choices: "The safety and reliability and national security aspects of not going forward with this treaty outweigh the ramifications in the international arena."
But even some Republicans rued the situation the Senate is finding itself in. "All things being equal, we'd rather not have this fight," the aide said. "We'd rather not be voting against nuclear tests."
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