In late October, President Trump declared on social media that he had ordered the Pentagon “to start testing our nuclear weapons,” thereby ending the voluntary moratorium imposed by the Bush Sr. administration in 1992. The president portrayed his decision as a response to “other countries’ testing programs” and singled out Russia and China, which he later claimed had conducted small-scale underground detonations covertly.
One month later, and the administration has yet to take concrete steps forward. However, the resumption of America’s nuclear testing could have dangerous repercussions for the U.S. and the world.
Trump’s statement sounded like an improvisation. He surprised his aides. He erroneously claimed that the U.S. (not Russia) had the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. He mistakenly suggested that the Department of War (not the Department of Energy) handled nuclear testing. Finally, his Secretary of Energy quickly contradicted him.
As he seemed to suggest, several reports have accused Moscow and Beijing of conducting small “supercritical nuclear tests” to improve their warheads, exploiting long-standing ambiguities about what constitutes a test. But those allegations are difficult to verify. Regardless, the data such tests can provide is limited and pertains to nuclear safety rather than weapons enhancement.
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