A handout from the US Air Force shows an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile launching during a developmental test at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on February 5, 2020. US President Donald Trump said last week he had ordered the Pentagon to start nuclear weapons testing on a level with China and Russia. Photo / Clayton Wear, US Air Force, AFP
President Donald Trump’s announcement that he has ordered the United States to resume nuclear testing “immediately” - a move that could overturn a global taboo against the practice that has lasted three decades - has drawn confusion and alarm from some experts.
They argue that physical testing is outdated and would add momentum to an arms race it aims to counter.
However, the move relies on an argument popular within the Trump Administration that testing is necessary to combat a rising proliferation threat from states like Russia, China, and North Korea, all of which have modernised their systems in recent years.
At the least, some supporters say, the US needs to be prepared to test nuclear weapons so it can respond if its adversaries do.
“We’re standing in place and have the same nuclear arsenal that we had 50 years ago,” said Robert Peters, a research fellow focused on nuclear weapons at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank.
“There’s a need to do something to demonstrate that we’re not going to be intimidated or coerced by these autocrats in Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang.”
Though Trump said he had directed the “Department of War” to resume nuclear tests, the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration - not the Pentagon - would take the lead.
The NNSA operates the Nevada test site, a reservation about 100km northwest of Las Vegas where the US last conducted a nuclear test explosion deep under Rainier Mesa in September 1992.
Testing was stopped under President George Bush snr and later banned internationally by the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which prohibited “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion”. However, the United States did not ratify the treaty, and Russia withdrew its ratification in 2023.
Former workers at the Nevada test site said a return to testing could be expensive and complex.
Experience in physical testing has been lost, they said, because modern nuclear testing relies primarily on computer modelling and “subcritical” tests, which are halted before triggering physical explosions.
“The personnel issue is a big one. The test directors are not bureaucrats,” said Paul Dickman, a longtime federal nuclear official who was involved with several weapons tests in Nevada.
“It was not a PowerPoint crowd. These people had a lot of dirt under their fingernails.”
The test site, too, would need work. People who have visited the facilities recently describe the equipment used to excavate the test site as a “rust pit”. Many NNSA workers are gone, having either been fired as part of Elon Musk’s US Doge Service initiative or furloughed in the ongoing government shutdown.
“These are the people who build the weapons, who do the enrichment of the material, who test the existing stockpile,” said Representative Dina Titus (Democrat-Nevada), who planned to introduce a Bill to prevent any federal funds from being used to conduct a new test.
Some former officials said restarting testing could take years, though others said a simple test could be done in as little as six months.
“If all you wanted was a stunt - to say okay, you set off a nuclear explosive, don’t worry about the data - you would probably take one of the weapons out of reserve, strip it down somewhat and then just set it off,” said Ernest Moniz, a nuclear physicist and co-chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative who served as energy secretary during the Obama administration. That would take “maybe a year”, Moniz said.
Even a simple test could cost as much as US$100 million ($174m), said Corey Hinderstein, the former acting principal deputy administrator for the NNSA.
“From what I have heard, we would have to dig a new vertical shaft to not disrupt other operations in Nevada,” said Hinderstein, who now oversees the nuclear policy programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Peters called a years-long wait to ready the Nevada site “simply unacceptable”, adding that a president who wanted to move faster could decide to do an “above-ground test”.
The United States has not conducted an above-ground nuclear test, also known as an atmospheric nuclear test explosion, since 1962.
The practice was banned internationally by the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which also prohibited tests underwater and in space.
Trump posted his surprise order to resume testing on Truth Social last Thursday afternoon NZT shortly before he met Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The post did not make clear whether Trump was ordering tests of nuclear explosives or some other kind of nuclear test; he said the goal was to test on an “equal basis” with Russia and China.
Moscow last conducted a nuclear test in 1990, during the final days of the Soviet Union. China last conducted tests in 1996.
The only nation to conduct nuclear tests in the 21st century is North Korea, which last tested a nuclear device in 2017.
The White House declined to comment beyond Trump’s post; the Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment. Trump told reporters he would say more on the subject soon.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a non-partisan organisation that promotes arms control policies, called on the White House to quickly clarify Trump’s post, “because his statement is confused and incoherent and - when it comes to nuclear weapons policy - we cannot afford to have confusing signals and statements”.
Non-proliferation experts say the international consensus on testing is fraught.
If one country were to start testing, “the whole house of cards would collapse”, said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit group.
During the first Trump Administration, senior officials discussed the possibility of conducting a nuclear test, citing their concerns that Russia had “probably” conducted secret tests of low-yield nuclear weapons.
Last year in a Foreign Affairs article, Robert O’Brien, a close Trump ally who served as national security adviser in his first term, called for the US to “test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world”.
Last week Senator Tom Cotton (Republican-Arkansas) repeated the claims, stating that both Russia and China had conducted “nuclear weapons tests to advance their nuclear programmes.”
Non-proliferation experts have responded to the claims about Russia and China cautiously, pointing to a lack of firm evidence.
James Acton, co-director of the nuclear programme at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that the US also has performed subcritical testing, setting off a nuclear weapon “designed to stop just before the plutonium goes critical and generates a nuclear yield”.
Some experts said Trump’s post may have come in response to recent advances in nuclear-powered weapons in Russia, which has claimed to have developed nuclear-powered missiles and torpedoes that can move at fast speeds with almost unlimited range.
The Defence Department estimated last year that China will surpass 1000 warheads by 2030 - a number considerably behind both the US and Russia, which have been estimated to have 3700 and 4300, respectively.
Since Bush stopped full-scale underground testing in 1992, scientists at the NNSA’s labs have continuously performed lower-scale tests to gather data on how the warhead cores and parts around the cores are holding up, as the cores decay over time and emit radiation that could affect the structural integrity of the metal parts around it.
Many of the weapons in the stockpile have cores that were created 50 years ago; since there hasn’t been a full-scale test in more than 30 years, there’s uncertainty about how those weapons would function. “They’re not quite sure,” said Titus.
Each January, the president receives a detailed letter on the status of the nuclear stockpile, informed by reports from NNSA labs and the US Strategic Command and signed by the secretaries of energy and defence.
“For sure, up to now every year, that whole set of players has said there is no need for testing,” said Moniz, who signed the letter for four years as energy secretary.
Instead of conferring advantage, some former officials argue that resuming testing would end a key strategic advantage for the US.
Of the more than 2000 nuclear test explosions around the world since 1945, according to tracking from the Arms Control Association, roughly half were conducted by the US.
“In the long term, we have so much data from our 1000-plus tests,” Hinderstein said.
“Our adversaries would love to start catching up.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.