President Clinton announced Saturday that he had extended the existing U.S. moratorium on underground nuclear tests for at least another 14 months and called on other nuclear powers to observe a similar moratorium while negotiating a permanent test ban.
Citing the end of the Cold War as a reason to "redefine what it means to preserve security," Clinton said the United States would explore other means than nuclear testing to maintain the safety, reliability and performance of its nuclear arsenal.Clinton, speaking in his weekly radio address, alluded to the difficulties of making a national security decision that provoked extended debate among his top advisers and may bring to a close the 48-year era of U.S. nuclear testing for weapons development.
Clinton's announcement came after top administration aides had twice unsuccessfully sought congressional approval for a resumption of nuclear testing, in an effort spurred by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the three U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and the Defense Department. They initially proposed to conduct small blasts for an indefinite period, then shifted to advocating just nine more blasts before 1996.
Both ideas were rejected by Clinton after the arms control community lobbied aggressively against them and key Democratic legislators defected from a coalition that last year supported conducting up to 15 more blasts before 1996. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, said Saturday that he applauded Clinton's decision, partly because there is no longer any "need to conduct tests of nuclear weapons merely to demonstrate our strength."
Officials at the weapons laboratories, which long have feared a test ban would harm their budgets and undermine the technical competence of their staff, did not hide their disappointment. "The president, in making his decision . . . had to consider other factors beside our technical advice," said Los Alamos National Laboratory director Sig Hecker in a written statement. "We would have preferred more time to prepare for the test ban."
The president said that conducting additional nuclear blasts would have provided for some weapons safety improvements and helped prepare for a test ban, as advocates of nuclear testing had claimed. But he said administration experts had decided after extensive review that existing weapons were safe and reliable.