by CKR
Dana Milbank tells us that Bill Clinton made quite a claim for himself:
"Every president from Dwight Eisenhower through to me supported the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty," he informed the crowd. "We finally got it done."This is sort of correct, in that Bill Clinton signed the treaty.
But the Senate failed to ratify it. I believe that this was the first time that the Senate failed to ratify a treaty that the president signed. Not so great a testimony to Clinton's powers of persuasion.
So I don't know what Clinton means by "got it done." In fact, his wife* proposes to
seek ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 2009, the tenth year of its initial rejection by the Senate.So she knows it's not "done."
Without the US's ratification (and that of other countries), the CTBT can't go into effect. But some preliminary work is being done by the countries that have ratified it.
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* Yes, I use that word with premeditation.