Allies of Donald J. Trump have proposed that the United States resume underground nuclear testing if the former president is re-elected in November. Many nuclear experts oppose such a return to testing as unnecessary and say it risks ending a testing moratorium that has been respected for decades by the world's major nuclear powers.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Robert C. O'Brien, President Trump's former national security adviser, urges the president to conduct a nuclear test if he is re-elected. “For the first time since 1992, Washington must test the reliability and safety of new nuclear weapons in the real world,” he writes. Doing so, he adds, would allow the United States to “maintain a technological and numerical advantage over the combined nuclear arsenals of China and Russia.”
In 1992, when the Cold War ended, the United States gave up testing nuclear weapons explosions and eventually convinced other nuclear-armed nations to do the same. To test the lethality of its weapons, the United States instead relied on the experts and machines at its domestic weapons laboratories. Today, that machinery includes supercomputers the size of a room, the world's most powerful X-ray machines, and laser systems the size of sports stadiums.
In the article, O'Brien said the studies merely “use computer models.” Republican lawmakers and some nuclear experts have criticized the non-explosive tests as insufficient to assure U.S. military officials that the weapons are effective and have called for live-fire tests.
But the Biden administration and other Democrats have warned that a U.S. nuclear test could set off a chain reaction by other countries, adding that over time a resumption of nuclear testing could lead to a nuclear arms race, destabilize the global balance of terror and increase the risk of war.
“This is a terrible idea,” said Ernest J. Moniz, who oversaw the U.S. nuclear arsenal as secretary of energy during the Obama administration. “Any new tests would make us less safe. We cannot divorce ourselves from the global implications.”
Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, said the new tests represented a dangerous trade-off between domestic gains and global losses. “We have more to lose than any of America's nuclear adversaries,” he said.
It's unclear whether Trump will follow through on the nuclear testing proposal. In a statement, Trump's co-campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Suzi Wiles, did not directly address the candidate's position on nuclear testing. They said O'Brien and other outside groups and individuals “have misconceptions, are speaking prematurely, and may be completely wrong” about a second Trump administration's plans.
Still, Trump's record of threats, intimidation and hardline policies on nuclear weapons suggests he might be open to such guidance from his security advisers. In 2018, Trump boasted that his “nuclear button” was “much bigger and more powerful” than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's arms control apparatus.
A U.S. nuclear test would violate the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, long considered one of the most successful arms control measures. Signed by the world's nuclear-armed states in 1996, the treaty was intended to curb a costly arms race that had spiraled out of control.
During the Cold War, China conducted 45 test explosions, France 210, Russia 715 and the United States 1,030, all with the aim of uncovering flaws in weapons designs and testing their reliability.
Nuclear experts say the testing imbalance deters other countries from making their nuclear arsenals more diverse and powerful, giving the United States a military advantage.
The possibility of new testing was rekindled during President Trump's inauguration in 2017. In addition to discussing a restart, administration officials have called for a faster preparation time for the resumption of US nuclear testing. The federal agency that manages the US nuclear testing site has ordered the time needed for preparation to be shortened from several years to as little as six months.
Nuclear experts have said the goal was unrealistic because testing equipment at the sprawling Nevada desert site has fallen into disrepair and been lost.
Last year, the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation recommended the U.S. do away with the preparation period, and policy guidance for conservative presidential candidates called for Washington to “move toward instant test preparation.”
In his Foreign Affairs article, O'Brien argued that the Biden administration's response to China and Russia's nuclear buildup had been weak. He said U.S. weapon test explosions strengthen the U.S. arsenal and help deter America's enemies. His article focused on the safety and reliability of new designs, not those tested during the Cold War.
“It would be negligent to deploy novel nuclear weapon designs that have never been tested in the real world,” said Christian Whitton, who served as a State Department adviser under George W. Bush and Trump and did background research for O'Brien's article.
Asked for examples, Whitten cited two new American weapons that he said needed to be detonated: both thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, and both many times more destructive than the bomb that devastated Hiroshima.
The first bomb, called W93, would be mounted on a submarine missile. The Biden administration announced its development in March 2022, with Whitton calling it a “completely new design.”
But the Biden administration's work plan for the W93 says otherwise. It says the warhead will rely on “currently fielded and previously tested nuclear designs.” Moreover, Los Alamos developers maintain the warhead can be deployed safely and reliably without relying on more explosive testing.
The alternative to live explosions “would allow the W93 to be deployed without the need for additional nuclear testing,” Charles W. Nakreh, the lab's vice director for weapons physics, said in a Los Alamos publication.
The other weapon Whitton mentioned is the B61-13, a variant of a bomb first deployed in 1968. The Biden administration announced its development in October, and Whitton described it as “extensively redesigned.” Still, the official plan is for nuclear components to be salvaged from older B61 versions and reused in the new model.
“The idea of a wholesale redesign is not convincing,” said Hans M. Christensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private research organization in Washington. “The explosive parts have already been tested.”
But Whitton believes even minor changes “should be proven in the real world.” He also argued that the U.S. needs to develop new warheads to counter hypervelocity (or hypersonic) weapons being developed by China and Russia. “We're likely going to need new warhead designs,” he said, which would require new testing.
Despite the conflicting claims and the uncertain outcome of the election, nuclear experts say China and Russia are preparing new nuclear testing sites in case the US restarts its nuclear programme, or to get ahead of the curve themselves. Dr Moniz, the former Energy Secretary, said he fears the US will act first if Trump is re-elected.
Whitton, the former State Department adviser, cast doubt on the idea that a U.S. nuclear detonation would set off a global chain reaction, noting that Russia and China are already building up their nuclear arsenals without resorting to new tests.
“It's unclear whether existing nuclear powers or aspiring nuclear powers will follow our lead,” he said of the global reaction. “If they do, the downside is that their capabilities may improve slightly.”
The advantage, Whitton said, is that the United States could study foreign nuclear explosions for clues about their hidden properties — for example, monitoring tiny vibrations in rock from underground tests to estimate the yield of a nuclear weapon.
Whitton added that such measurements “will help us appropriately update our deterrent capabilities.”
The problem with Whitton's point is its implicit consequence: that the world could slip back into a cycle of costly action and counter-action that characterized the Cold War, say many nuclear experts. They warn that this century the nuclear arms race could become more global, innovative, deadly and unpredictable.
“China has much more to gain from resuming nuclear testing than we do,” said Dr. Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos. “It would open the door for other countries to test nuclear weapons and reignite an arms race that would endanger the entire world. We shouldn't go that far.”
Michael Gold Contributed report.