ABSTRACT
Like many presidents before him, early in his administration Jimmy Carter expressed the hope of achieving a total cessation of nuclear weapons testing as a prelude to eliminating nuclear weapons altogether. Thus, despite, major disagreements within the US government, and without a formal position on what would constitute acceptable terms, in 1977 the United States revived the Geneva-based multilateral Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) negotiations, with the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain participating. Nuclear weapons are fabricated from chemically-active materials that deteriorate in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Proponents of a CTBT argue that so-called "proof-testing," conducting nuclear tests to check the nuclear weapons stockpile and to identify and/or correct problems, is not part of the present US nuclear weapons maintenance program, and that, consequently, a ban on nuclear testing would have no impact on nuclear weapons reliability.
