India’s Nuclear Blasts Being Used as Excuse, Critics Charge

WASHINGTON — Efforts are underway to scuttle the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty under the guise of urging a go-slow approach by the Senate in the wake of India’s nuclear tests, some experts said Friday.

Citing a new statement from the Heritage Foundation titled “India’s Nuclear Tests Show Folly of Rushing Test Ban Treaty,” critics said that such declarations are part of an emerging effort to kill the test ban on Capitol Hill. Among those available for comment are:

SAM DAY
Day, former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said: “The real answer is that we should not pull back from the CTBT.” Challenging what he called a global nuclear caste system, Day said that India “wants nuclear weapons too, since the U.S. is not getting out of the nuclear weapons business.”

JAY TRUMAN
“It is frightening and yet at the same time not at all surprising that the current nuclear crisis set off by India’s tests would be used as an excuse to revive U.S. participation in another global nuclear arms race,” said Jay Truman, director of the Downwinders organization. During the 1950s, Truman grew up in Southern Utah, where he watched mushroom clouds rise from the Nevada Test Site about 110 miles to the west.

ANTHONY GUARISCO
Guarisco was one of an estimated 300,000 members of the U.S. armed forces who witnessed U.S. nuclear test explosions at close range. Now director of the Alliance of Atomic Veterans, he said: “We are absolutely positive that the best deterrent to nuclear war is the abolition of all nuclear weapons.”

JACQUELINE CABASSO
Executive Director of the Western States Legal Foundation, she recently returned from international meetings in Geneva on nuclear non-proliferation.

PERVEZ HOODBHOY
A Pakistani physicist who is a visiting professor in the Nuclear Theory Group at the University of Maryland, he said that “the United States enjoys complete supremacy in the nuclear field today. It has no need to test … since it has enormous data from previous test explosions.”

DANIEL ELLSBERG
Currently director of Manhattan Project II, an anti-proliferation group.

For further information, contact Theresa Caldwell or Sam Husseini at the Institute for Public Accuracy, (202) 347-0020.