Why Biden should push for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

ABSTRACT

President-elect Joe Biden has long supported the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. But three important factors have shifted the context in recent years, making US participation more important than ever. His administration should invest effort and resources into persuading the Senate to finally ratify it.

KEYWORDS:

• Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
• nuclear testing
• racial justice

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Togzhan Kassenova

Togzhan Kassenova is a senior fellow with the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany, adjunct faculty at George Washington University, and a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her expertise is in nuclear policy, WMD nonproliferation, proliferation financing controls, and financial crime prevention. She is the author of From Antagonism to Partnership: The Uneasy Path of the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction (2007) and Brazil's Nuclear Kaleidoscope: An Evolving Identity (2014). She is a native of Kazakhstan.