Allies of Donald Trump are proposing that the United States resume testing nuclear weapons in underground detonations if the former president is re-elected in November. Some nuclear experts dismiss such a resumption as unnecessary, saying it would end a testing moratorium that the world’s major nuclear powers have observed for decades.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Robert C. O’Brien, a former national security adviser to Trump, urged him to conduct nuclear tests if he wins another term. Washington, he wrote, “must test new nuclear weapons for real-world reliability and safety for the first time since 1992.” Doing so, he added, would allow the United States to “maintain technical and numerical superiority over the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles.”
At the end of the Cold War, in 1992, the United States gave up explosive testing of nuclear weapons and eventually convinced other nuclear powers to do the same. The U.S. turned instead to experts and machines in the nation’s weapons labs to verify the lethality of the country’s arsenal. Today, the machines include supercomputers the size of a room, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine and a system of lasers the size of a sports stadium.
