Donald Trump has repeatedly called the proliferation of nuclear weapons “the n-word,” his way of warning that speaking “nuclear” into existence puts the world on the path of mutually assured destruction.
But 10 months into his second administration, the president is commanding officials to resume nuclear weapons testing, which would end the U.S’s 33-year moratorium and invite a global arms race in a volatile political moment.
Claiming that the United States must reach parity with weapons development in China and Russia, Trump ordered the Pentagon on October 30 to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” a process that will begin “immediately,” he said.
The last confirmed nuclear test by the United States was in 1992 under then-President George H.W. Bush, who established a moratorium on all nuclear testing. China has reportedly not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996, and Russia’s most recent tests involved delivery systems, not actual detonation of a nuclear device.
It’s unclear whether Trump intends to test nuclear-capable missiles or launch full-scale explosive tests. But the world’s leading nuclear scientists and Pulitzer Prize-winning nuclear bodies are sounding the alarm.
“That is the kind of reckless imprecision we should not have to tolerate from the person who has the sole authority to launch U.S. nuclear weapons,” according Alexandra Bell, president of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Before Trump’s announcement, the Bulletin had set the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds to midnight, “the closest it has ever been to catastrophe.”
“Words matter, especially to the communities in the United States and around the world that have suffered from the effects of nuclear explosive testing,” Bell said in a statement to The Independent.
What does explosive testing look like?
On July 16, 1945, the United States tested a plutonium implosion device roughly 200 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, home of the world’s first-ever nuclear explosion. The “Trinity” test released more than 18 kilotons of power, instantly vaporizing the tower that held the device and turning the surrounding asphalt and sand into green glass.
The shockwave of intense heat knocked nearby observers to the ground. Witnesses as far as 200 miles away reported seeing an immense explosion that filled the sky with fire and black smoke.
The United States did not publicly disclose what actually caused the massive fireball until after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, which killed tens of thousands of people.
The U.S. government has performed more than 1,000 tests since then, accounting for more than half of all global nuclear weapons tests in the decades that followed, according to the United Nations.
The vast majority of those tests were performed underground, with nuclear devices detonated at varying depths below the earth’s surface.
Underground explosions are believed to emit negligible nuclear fallout levels compared to atmospheric tests, but those explosions can produce dangerous radioactive debris if they “vent” to the surface, or leak into groundwater.
Until the 1990s, more than 900 U.S. tests were performed at the “Nevada Test Site” roughly 60 miles outside of Las Vegas. Most of those tests were performed underground, though dozens of iconic mushroom clouds from dozens of atmospheric tests performed at the site have been visible from the Vegas strip and beyond.
The United States also has performed explosive tests in the Marshall Islands and Kiritimati Island in the Pacific Ocean, though several other tests have been performed across the United States, including Alaska, Colorado and Mississippi.
Most nuclear weapons testing was banned under the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, except for underground tests. Underground tests weren’t banned until the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which was signed by the world’s atomic powers in 1996.
But the treaty was never ratified in the United States; it was rejected by the Senate in 1999, leaving it effectively unenforced. Russia rescinded its ratification of the treaty in 2023, pointing to the United States’ failure to do so.
North Korea is believed to be the only country to have openly tested a nuclear weapon in this century, in 2017.
Can the U.S. resume explosive tests?
If the United States does resume explosive tests, the process could take more than a year and would require approval from Congress, according to Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists.
The White House would have to direct the Department of Energy to order nuclear laboratories to start preparing, “and since the United States doesn’t currently have a nuke weapons test explosion program, Congress would have to appropriate the money,” he wrote.
“It would be expensive and take time: a simple explosion is 6-10 months, a fully instrumented test in 24-36 months, and a test to develop a new nuclear warhead is about 60 months,” according to Kristensen.
Any “scientifically useful” test would take years, according to Dylan Spaulding, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program. “Anything shorter than that would be nothing more than dangerous political showmanship and would not allow collection of useful data,” he wrote.
Trump said he has ordered the Department of Defense to perform tests, but it is the National Nuclear Security Administration under the Department of Energy that is responsible.
The Pentagon, however, could perform tests of nuclear-capable missiles.
If Trump is referring to those kinds of tests, then Trump’s statement appears similar to one he delivered on August 1, when he dispatched two nuclear submarines to “appropriate regions” in response to Russia’s nuclear threats, “just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” he said at the time.
“Trump’s statement was provocative but meaningless, as U.S. subs are always in range of Russia,” said Stephen Young, associate director for government affairs for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program.
During the president’s 2024 campaign, Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien called on his administration to resume nuclear tests “for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992.”
Reactivating nuke tests will “maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles,” he wrote at the time.
Nuclear weapons testing and weapon stockpiling are also key parts of the defense recommendations in Project 2025, the 900-page Heritage Foundation-backed manifesto for Trump’s second term.
Project 2025 called for the rejection of current arms control treaties considered “contrary to the goal of bolstering nuclear deterrence.”
Those proposals, written by Trump’s former defense secretary Christopher Miller, called for the acceleration of all weapons production and to prioritize nuclear development over any other security programs, including boosting supplies above treaty limits, and creating a new nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile.
How will other world powers react?
World powers possess more than 12,000 nuclear warheads, according to the Federation of American Scientists. The United States and Russia possess roughly 87 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons inventory and 83 percent of warheads available for military use.
“Any actual move to return to explosive testing would set off a cascade with the other nuclear-armed states likely to follow,” according to Bell with the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
“No one would benefit from that more than China, as they are currently building up their nuclear forces, but lack the extensive testing data that the United States possesses,” she said.
But another key safeguard against a global arms race between the two major nuclear powers is set to expire in February.
The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty has sought to limit the United States and Russia to no more than 1,550 deployed warheads on no more than 700 operational launchers, but no talks appear to be underway on another agreement.
A failure to renew an agreement “risks the first major buildup of deployed U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons in more than 35 years,” according to Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
Melissa Parke, director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, said in a statement to The Independent that Trump’s remarks are an “unnecessary and reckless nuclear threat escalation” that disregards “the ongoing harm already caused over the last 80 years by nuclear detonations.”
“By the way, this is no way to win the Nobel Peace Prize,” she said.
