The head of the United Nations’ nuclear test ban treaty organization says the regime in Iran should follow up on its nuclear deal with world powers by ratifying the treaty and assuring it will never conduct a nuclear test explosion.
Lassina Zerbo said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press that if Iran doesn’t ratify the treaty, “it will leave room for the doubt that people have put in this deal and the good intentions of Iran.”
Zerbo said Iran should have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, known as the CTBT, before negotiations started on the deal to rein in its nuclear program.
The CTBT organization has 196 member states — 183 that have signed the treaty and 164 that have ratified it. But the treaty has not entered into force because it still needs ratification by eight countries involved in originally negotiating it.
While waiting for the CTBT to enter into force, the organization has spent more than $1 billion on an international monitoring system that can detect a nuclear test by the regime in Iran or any other country, Zerbo said. It detected all three tests by North Korea.
The system uses four technologies — 170 seismic stations to pick up shock waves from any underground explosion, “hydro-acoustic” monitoring to pick up anything that happens underwater, 48 “infrasound” stations to detect low-frequency waves in the atmosphere that can travel long distances, and 80 “radionucleide” stations to sample the air for radiation, which Zerbo called “the smoking gun.”
The highly sophisticated monitoring systems can also detect earthquakes, tsunamis, air contamination, the movement of whales and the trajectory of space launches, as well as meteors including the ones in Russia in February 2013 and over Thailand on Sept. 7, he said.
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