Global Security Newswire, 23 Sep 2011.

Washington -- A number of leading nuclear arms control proponents this week said the international community should act promptly to make key features of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty permanent, despite a widespread view that the pact itself will not be formally implemented for many years to come (see GSN, Aug, 16).

The 1996 agreement would ban all nuclear explosions, whether for military or peaceful purposes. Because it has not yet entered into force, the organizations created to promote the agreement and build its verification regime were labeled temporary from the outset.

"We propose to eliminate [the] words 'provisional' and 'preparatory' from the letterheads" of CTBT-related institutions and from international "lexicon," Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Henry L. Stimson Center, said at a Thursday event.

The idea would be to help preserve the benefits offered by the Vienna. Austria-based CTBT Organization's international seismic monitoring and radiation detection services, Krepon said. The treaty organization also plays a role in detecting and warning nations about incoming tsunamis.

Foreign ministers from roughly 100 nations are meeting on Friday at the United Nations to discuss how to facilitate the test-ban treaty's entry into force-- just one day prior to the 15th anniversary of the accord's signing ceremony.

There is little expectation, though, that selected nations that must ratify the pact before it could be formally implemented -- China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Israel and the United States -- will all do so in the foreseeable future. Three others -- India, North Korea and Pakistan  -- must also sign and ratify the agreement for it to enter into force.

"This is a tough list," Krepon said of nine holdout nations. "It will take a very long time before all the states [required would] consent to ratify this treaty," he wrote in a blog post last week.

Even in Washington -- which has upheld an informal moratorium on nuclear explosive tests since 1992 -- prospects are seen as dim that President Obama could get enough Senate Republicans on board to achieve the to-thirds majority necessary for ratification, particularly in the run-up to the 2010 elections.

Obama has championed the accord but has not indicated when he plans to submit it to the Senate for ratification.

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, expressed confidence that some of the key nations would consider ratification once China and the United States acted to do so. He did not forecast that Beijing or Washington would act anytime soon on the matter, though.

"The treaty's tortured entry-into-force provision was the handiwork of china, Russia and France, whose leaders felt obligated to sign, but remained reluctant to end nuclear testing permanently," Krepon wrote in his blog. "They resolved this conundrum by giving other recalcitrant states vetoes over the treaty's entry into force."

Even though the treaty itself could remain hamstrung into the future, Krepon and Kimball said they think making the CTBT Preparatory Commission and Provisional Technical Secretariat permanent could offer the international regime against nuclear explosive tests a symbolically important boost.

The CTBT Preparatory Commission -- or, more formally, the "Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear - Test-Ban Organization" -- operates facilities in more than 70 countries and employs a staff numbering 260 or so The commission's role is to promote the treaty and create a verification regime that would be ready to operate once the agreements into force.

The Provisional Technical Secretariat provides assistance to the commission, including managing an International Monitoring System and an International Data Center that analyzes incoming data.

with roughly $ 120 million in annual international funding, the CTBT headquarters has completed roughly 80 percent of the global monitoring system's construction, including more than 250 monitoring stations and 10 laboratories. It has already succeeded in detecting seismic activity that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, including a very low-yield North Korean test in October 2006, according to Krepon and other nuclear experts.

These capabilities are widely believed helpful in discouraging Pyongyang and other capitals from carrying out covert atomic test.

There is growing sense, though, that the evolving international regime is at risk of withering on the vine.

"The longer the CTBT remains in limbo, the more difficult it is likely to be for this treaty-monitoring system to remain at a very high level of effectiveness," Krepon said at the panel discussion. "We therefore propose the change the treaty organization's 'preparatory' moniker, and the 'provisional Technical Secretariat, into more permanent features of the international system."

Simply altering the names of these organizations could help reinforce the global suspension of any nuclear tests, until such time as the negotiated ban is instituted, he said.

Signaling that the CTBT institutions are here to stay would also underscore the value of the global monitoring they already ´perform, and help encourage all nations to contribute facilities and data to the treaty organization, Krepon said. china, he noted, does not share its national monitoring data with the CTBT organization, even though Russia and the United States do.

"Reaffirmation and recommitment can take many forms: by completing and upgrading monitoring stations, sharing data, making test sites more transparent, and by participating in joint monitoring experiments,"Krepon said last week.

David Koplow, and international legal scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center, laid out four potential alternatives for making more permanent the existing functions of the test-ban treaty organization.

Speaking at the Thursday event, he said the CTBT Preparatory Commission and Provisional Technical Secretariat could simply drop "preparatory" and "provisional" from their letterheads, signage and business cards. This "could be done immediately," Koplow said, noting that he was providing legal analysis but would leave political assessments to others.

Because this option would not involve a legal change, the commission and secretariat might still be required to use the so-called "P-words" in formal documents, Koplow said. However, nothing would prevent them from informally becoming known as simply the "CTBT Commission" and the "Technical Secretariat," respectively.

Kimball said a group of nongovernmental organizations would deliver to the U.N. conference in Friday a proposal saying that "at the very least, the CTBT states parties should drop the 'preparatory' and 'provisional' words as a matter of practice."

"Every state should recognize that the Provisional Technical Secretary to the CTBTO Preparatory Commission is -- for all practical purposes -- no longer 'provisional,'" according to the statement, endorsed by three dozen arms control organization directors and issue experts.

The monitoring system and associated institutions "are now and essential part of today's 21 st century international security architecture that enables all states to detect and deter nuclear test explosions," reads the document, which also includes other recommendations for reinforcing the test ban and strengthening international nuclear security.

The other three name-change alternatives that Koplow contemplates would involve international agreements or action by the U.N. Security Council, each of which could offer a formal legal avenue, he said. These alternative options, though might also be more politically difficult to accomplish Koplow noted.

"Language matters," said Krepon. He suggested that the informal change of designation could be embraced as just a first step.

Koplow called the proposed approach "a very creative idea", a simple act that could help urge along the test ban regime "after so many years of frustration in bringing the treaty fully into force." If the appellations are changed informally, CTBT advocates might then "keep stocking the fires" by pursuing in the longer haul a "legal mechanism" to make the treaty institutions officially permanent, he said.

Krepon acknowledged that what he and others are recommending stops well short of their ultimate objective.

"Some treaty supporters will argue that steps are insufficient and poor substitutes for the treaty's entry into force," he said in his blog post "They are correct."

However, he argued, the slim prospects for near-term implementation of the full treaty demand that potentially more achievable and nearer term goals be contemplated.

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