Nuclear test-ban treaty chief: U.S. must ratify pact

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate opponents of the nuclear test-ban treaty face “a new ballgame” 10 years after they rejected the global pact, the treaty’s chief said Tuesday.

If the U.S. and other key nations fail again to ratify the pact, the world will become a place with “more fissile material in more facilities with more people to handle it, representing a risk of [nuclear] terrorism,” said Tibor Toth, executive secretary of the treaty’s preparatory commission.

“Probably what you will have to do is revisit the benefits of the treaty from a wider perspective, from a post-2001 viewpoint,” Toth told The Associated Press.

The Hungarian diplomat was in Washington to meet with Senate staff and take part in a conference on nuclear nonproliferation organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The conference was dominated by talk of President Barack Obama’s speech Sunday in Prague, Czech Republic, laying out plans for a world free of nuclear weapons. Obama said he aimed to “immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.”