15 October 2004	Friday	29 Shaban 1425

VIENNA: Whether big or small, high in the sky or deep in the ground, if you test a nuclear bomb, someone in the Austrian capital will find out. Austria is one of Europe's most anti-nuclear countries.

So it makes sense that two organizations charged with keeping the world free of atomic weapons are based here - the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).

Both have their headquarters in the fortress-like Vienna International Centre that overlooks the peaceful Danube river. "We would be able to detect (any nuclear test) with possibly a 98 per cent guarantee," CTBTO spokeswoman Daniela Rozgonova told journalists during an agency field exercise in Slovakia.

The test-ban treaty was opened for signing in 1996. Since then, the CTBTO has been working furiously to cover the planet with monitoring stations so that by the time the treaty comes into force, the entire world will be under its gaze.

For example, Rozgonova said the CTBTO was in a position to know a lot about last month's mysterious blast in North Korea, an explosion that some feared may have been the first nuclear test carried out by the reclusive Stalinist state. But any analysis the CTBTO had about North Korea would be kept a secret and passed on to the 173 CTBTO member states to decide what to do with information they receive from the agency. "It is the member states who ... decide what the data means. We do the technical analysis," she said.

NEVER UNDER BUSH: The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban treaty prohibits any civilian or military nuclear explosions and was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 10 1996. So far, 119 of the 173 signatories have ratified it.

Although the CTBTO is clearly capable of monitoring the planet to make sure no one conducts a secret nuclear test, its hands are tied by the fact that the treaty has yet to come into force.

Some diplomats in Vienna question if it will ever become a binding international treaty. To come into force, the 44 states which participated in the 1996 conference where the pact was agreed must ratify it.

So far, 33 of the 44 have ratified it; 11 - including the the United States, Iran, Israel and China - have not. India, Pakistan and North Korea are among those which have yet to either sign or ratify the pact.

Several Western diplomats in Vienna said the administration of US President George W. Bush was vehemently opposed to the test-ban treaty and would like to see it destroyed. "The Bush administration will never sign on to anything that would tie its hands in the event of a military conflict," commented a diplomat familiar with US thinking.

As a signatory of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Washington agreed to gradually dispose of its nuclear arsenal. Rather than disarm, it has expressed interest in developing so-called "mini-nukes" - smaller-scale atomic bombs.

Some diplomats said that the concept of sharing classified seismological data with other CTBTO member states which might be considered enemies was anathema to Washington. CTBTO spokeswoman Rozgonova said she had no choice to believe that the treaty would someday become binding. "We have to be optimistic about the treaty coming into force," she said.

READY FOR A BLAST: While waiting for that to happen, the CTBTO busies itself with setting up a complex network of 321 monitoring stations and 16 laboratories. Half of the monitoring stations are up and running.

Although the agency's monitoring network is not yet complete, the CTBTO already covers a large part of the globe. It also possesses powerful detection equipment. In 2002, the organization's experts detonated 12.5 tons of chemical explosive at a depth of 200 metres (656 feet) in the former Soviet nuclear test site Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

This was recorded by CTBTO's monitors as far away as Norway, thousands of kilometres from the explosion site. "One kiloton is the smallest achievable nuclear bomb by countries still on their way to create their own nuclear weapon," CTBTO scientist Patrick Dewez said.

A kiloton is the explosive equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT. Although the quantity detonated during the Semipalatinsk test was only about 1 per cent of the size of a standard nuclear bomb, the Kazakhstan experiment proved that the CTBTO possesses the technical capability to detect all kinds of explosive activities around the globe.

With portable equipment no bigger than a rucksack, they would try to detect "aftershock" waves which would provide evidence of suspected nuclear tests. -Reuters