Test ban treaties now and then

By DAVID GREEN

The headline Friday -- NASCAR implements test ban to cut costs -- took me back to the year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was signed by President John F. Kennedy. It outlawed testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater.

The treaty Kennedy signed (it was one of the last significant actions of the president, who was destined to die from an assassin's bullet a little more than a month later) had little to do with cost-cutting, as NASCAR's test ban does. It was more about survival of the human species than it was about economics. NASCAR's concern is about survival, too, but in an economic sense.

It's hard to say whether the nuclear test ban accomplished anything of significance. And it's doubtful that the NASCAR treaty will, either. But I'd have to say I approve of both actions.

Even though I was a few months away from my 11th birthday in October 1963, I was aware of things that were going on. The previous summer, I had watched seemingly endless Army truck convoys carrying soldiers down U.S. 98/441 past Lake Okeechobee in Florida, where I lived in those days. I had watched with my mom and dad as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley gave solemn reports about Soviet nuclear missiles 90 miles from the U.S. mainland.

My friends and I played out scenarios in which we thwarted the progress of invading Russian and Cuban soldiers, but along with a fascination about the great adventure the missile crisis was to me, there was a sober understanding of the stakes of that "game."

A decade later, I would be working as a public affairs specialist with the Defense Nuclear Agency at its Field Command at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M. I would learn some of the details about how, in order to comply with the 1963 treaty's ban on atmospheric testing, U.S. scientists conducted underground tests and resorted to other measures.

They built mountainous stacks of TNT explosives to achieve the force of a nuclear explosion without producing the radioactive fallout, and could measure the blast impact on various hardware components, physical structures, and so forth.

They found a way.

There's little reason to think the NASCAR ban will be dealt with any differently. The test ban does not prohibit NASCAR teams from testing at alternative sites -- such as Rockingham Speedway and Concord Motorsports Park in North Carolina, Greenville-Pickens Speedway in South Carolina, USA International Speedway in Florida, the old Texas World Speedway near College Station, Texas and any other facility not on a NASCAR national touring series schedule.

About the only thing missing from the menu is a replica of the two restrictor-plate tracks, Daytona and Talladega. So, the matter of testing expenses won't go away. In fact, the intent of the rule -- to prevent lesser-funded teams from falling behind in the data acquisition department -- may have the opposite effect. Wealthy teams will be better able to seek out and utilize alternative test sites.

Likewise, the issue that the treaty addressed did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, the concerns are not about civilized, modern nations such as France, which had recently joined the nuclear age with an atmospheric test of an atomic devicein 1962. Now it is rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea and guerrilla terrorists who make the rest of the world uneasy. Treaties don't count for much with these outlaws.

With regard to nuclear weapons and racing technology, the genie is a long, long time out of the bottle. She's not going back in. That doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and not attempt to regulate things in a rational and civilized way. Make those who would reject the restrictions of the treaties work that much harder and spend that much more to circumvent them.

Dealing with economic issues in sport has a good many similarities to dealing with uncivilized aggressors in the modern world. Just as evil individuals and organizations will find a way, so will racing engineers and team owners.

Thankfully, the stakes are not as catastrophically high for the latter as for the former.