Beyond The Nuclear Explosion Verification Monitoring, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Offers A Strong Capacity Building System Support

Abstract

Purpose: The United Nations (UN) General Assembly, as part of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament measures to prohibit nuclear test explosions and any other nuclear explosions in all environments (in the atmosphere, oceans, and underground) adopted the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). Thus, it ultimately enhances international peace and security. It is an essential step aimed at making the world a safer place. States that agree to sign on to this Treaty will be contributing to the protection of human health and the environment against nuclear test explosions and their severe impacts. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the CTBT beyond its global prohibition measure against all nuclear explosions, is offering a strong Capacity Building System support to State Signatories such as the Republic of Ghana. The CTBT global verification regime is built to monitor States Signatories compliance with the Treaty. CTBT Organization (O) through the International Data Centre (IDC) provides States Signatories with technical assistance to support their verification responsibilities to ensure effective global monitoring.

Methodology: The Republic of Ghana through the Capacity Building project under the IDC technical assistance to States Signatories is a beneficiary of equipment support commissioned in July 2021. Under this project the GCI-III/VSAT equipment set was received from the IDC, establishing a new communication link for forwarding IMS waveform data from some selected stations in Africa in near-real-time to the National Data Centre – Ghana (NDC – GH). The IMS seismic data also contributes to prompt access to information on seismic events within our respective geographic territories globally, thus playing a complementary role.

Findings: The monitoring data generated provides essential civil and scientific applications to greatly support to mitigate the effects of natural or man-made disasters. This is an example of what the CTBT is providing to Member States beyond the Treaty’s main purpose.

Unique contributor to theory, policy and practice: It is therefore important for the international community to fashion out other multilateral agreements considering the possibility of incorporating the potential additional benefits States can derived from such agreements.