WASHINGTON — In one of the longest-running sagas in arms control history, President Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will sign protocols this week implementing two nuclear-test treaties reached a decade and a half ago but never ratified into law.
Taking up only two pages, the treaties limit underground nuclear tests for both military and non-military purposes and have been honored by both nations even though the final details were not resolved.
But the protocols to implement them fill 220 pages each, an indication of the technical and political issues that have bedeviled superpower efforts to curb nuclear tests since the treaties were signed in 1974 and 1976.
And while approval of the two protocols probably will assure ratification of the treaties, the United States and Soviet Union remain at odds over what comes next. Moscow wants to ban nuclear tests totally, rather than just limit them. But Washington insists that some testing will be necessary as long as nuclear weapons are required for deterrence.
Nuclear testing was the subject of the first U.S.-Soviet arms agreement in 1963. Responding to an international clamor to halt aboveground tests that rained radioactive fallout around the globe, the two nations agreed to ban tests in the air, in water and, later, in outer space.
The United States at the time was also prepared to limit tests underground but demanded on-site inspection to make up for the inadequacies of monitoring tests from distant seismic stations. Seismic waves from test blasts are hard to distinguish from earthquakes.
But the Soviets objected, saying that they feared the on-site inspectors would be spies.
More than a decade passed before the Threshold Test Ban Treaty was signed in 1974. It limits underground nuclear weapon tests to 150 kilotons, or the equivalent of 150,000 tons of TNT.
In 1976, the 150-kiloton limit was extended to non-military nuclear blasts, for such purposes as excavating canals or developing petroleum deposits, in the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty.
But Richard M. Nixon resigned as President before he could submit the 1974 treaty for Senate approval. Gerald R. Ford declined to send forward either treaty after he came under conservative attack from Ronald Reagan in the 1976 GOP primary.
Ford's successor, Jimmy Carter, wanted to leapfrog both treaties by negotiating a comprehensive test ban forbidding all nuclear weapon tests. But when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the old agreements, as well as the new negotiations, were put on hold.
