U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Christopher Yeaw delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute on Feb. 17 on U.S. nuclear arms control policy in the wake of the expiration of the New START Treaty.
“The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is a high priority for the administration, and we certainly have some things that we want to see advocated and advanced there. One is … the disarmament pillar, dealing with Article Six of the NPT and the obligation of nuclear weapon states, all of them, not just Russia and the United States, to enter into good faith negotiations toward a cessation of the nuclear arms race and to our arms control and eventual nuclear disarmament,” he said, reported TASS. “That’s a high priority for us. And there we need, frankly, the countries of the world, to continue to press that all nuclear weapon states need to be involved in this. It’s not a special responsibility for the U.S. and Russia,” he emphasized.
Yeaw also repeated the accusations against Russia and China made by his boss Undersecretary of State Thomas G. Dinanno at the Conference on Disarmament on Feb. 6. He claimed that both countries have conducted secret nuclear tests and that the current situation in this sphere is extremely disadvantageous for Washington. “Well, ask our Russian and Chinese counterparts, what are they gaining out of these tests? They’re conducting the tests again,” he said. “I’m aware that they are repudiating the facts. The facts are the facts.”
According to Yeaw, China conducted such a test at the testing range near Lake Lop Nur in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on June 22, 2020. “Of course, impossible to tell,” he stated. In his words, China uses “decoupling, which is essentially a method to reduce the effectiveness of seismic apparatus to detect this.” A CTBT seismic station in Kazakhstan detected a 2.75 magnitude tremor that was “entirely not consistent with an earthquake,” he claimed.
The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’s “flaw,” in his words, is that “ultra low-yield tests” cannot be detected. In such an environment, “the treaty becomes basically a fig leaf,” he argued. The CTBTO Preparatory Commission acknowledged in February that “there might be some limitations” to its capability to detect nuclear tests, he added.
