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THE US Senate's refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was an immensely dangerous and short-sighted decision.
It is none the less dangerous for the impression given that many senators had voted against the treaty not so much because of weaknesses within it but to indicate dissatisfaction either with President Bill Clinton in general or the failure of the extreme right to have him impeached.
The inability of senior elected officials to appreciate that the question of global security is more important than a parochial political squabble is, if anything, more worrying than the non-ratification decision itself.
Claims by some senators that the treaty is unverifiable fly in the face of experience and are contradicted by scientific research.
Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation of nuclear weaponry are closely linked issues.
If the world's major nuclear power reneges on a long-standing commitment to halt nuclear tests, there is an obvious danger that nuclear-capable states which have previously agreed not to press on with the production of nuclear weapons will reconsider that position.
After all, the logic of the arguments put forward by the Senate backwoodsmen was that only a nuclear arsenal can guarantee national security and only a readiness to continue testing can ensure that a nuclear deterrent remains effective.
Either the senators appreciate that these arguments would have an equal validity for other countries or they believe that there should be one rule for the US and one for the rest of the world.
But a unilateral opt-out by the US from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is not possible.
The treaty is either ratified by all 44 nuclear-capable states, including the US, or it falls, even though over 150 countries have already signified their backing for it.
The US and other members of the elite nuclear club were critical of the Indian and Pakistani governments for their testing of nuclear weapons last year.
Both Delhi and Islamabad would now be entitled to dismiss such concerns as hypocrisy.
European NATO leaders, such as Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who wrote a joint article in the New York Times last week appealing to the Senate to ratify the treaty, must be feeling chastened at the realisation of how little notice is taken of them by the Republican-dominated Senate.
They must also, in common with the rest of the world, feel unsettled by other US defence developments.
Recently agreed support by the US Congress for a national anti-missile defence system - an update on the Star Wars project pushed hard by former President Ronald Reagan - once again ups the ante and risks a new arms race with Russia and China.
It will also make it more difficult to win support in the Russian Duma for ratification of the Start-2 nuclear arms reduction treaty, which was itself seen as paving the way for more substantial cuts in nuclear arsenals.
At a time when the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation reports that at least 800 million people in the world are malnourished, it is shameful that the richest country on earth is ready to waste billions of dollars on unnecessary nuclear missile systems.