Holy cow, the 2011 Compliance Report is out.
Here I am, sitting in Idaho Falls with a glass of wine, reflecting on what a lovely nuclear waste dump this state would make, getting ready to hit the sack and then I see that.
I don’t see anything earth shattering, but I perused the text very quickly. One format change — the sections relating to compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty are now in separate reports. The State Departments released the so-called 10(C) and 5(C) reports, after sections in the resolutions of ratification containing the reporting requirement, at the same time.
Similarly, it looks like New START will get a separate report.
Odd, unless I’m missing something the testing moratoria section seems incomplete. It says the assessment is based on the U.S. definition of testing, but then doesn’t give any assessments.
“MORATORIA ON NUCLEAR TESTING
By September 1996, each of the nuclear-weapon States (NWS) under the NPT (China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States) had
declared a nuclear testing moratorium and had signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which has not yet entered into force. The scope of each moratorium
has not been publicly defined. While it is difficult to assess the compliance of a given state with its own moratorium, when the scope or meaning of a moratorium is unclear, U.S. assessments are based on the U.S. position of what constitutes a nuclear explosive test moratorium.”
This also seems to be a shift from last year’s report, which said “there were no indications during the reporting period that any NWS engaged in activities inconsistent with its declared moratorim.” So there was an assessment of adherence to each moratorium, even after admitting that the scope of each one hasn’t been publicly defined.