Donald J. Trump’s allies are proposing that the United States resume testing nuclear weapons in underground detonations if the former president is re-elected in November. Several nuclear experts reject such a resumption as unnecessary and say it would threaten to end a moratorium on testing that the world’s major atomic powers have observed for decades.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Robert C. O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, urged him to conduct nuclear tests if he wins another term. Washington, he wrote, “must test new nuclear weapons to verify their reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992.” Doing so, he added, would help the United States “maintain technical and numerical superiority over the combined nuclear arsenals of China and Russia.”
At the end of the Cold War in 1992, the United States abandoned explosive nuclear weapons testing and eventually persuaded other atomic powers to do the same. Instead, the United States turned to experts and machines in the country’s weapons labs to verify the lethality of the nation’s arsenal. Today, those machines include room-sized supercomputers, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine and a laser system the size of a sports stadium.
In his article, O’Brien described that work as merely “computer modeling.” Republican members of Congress and some nuclear experts have criticized non-explosive testing as insufficient to assure the U.S. military that its arsenal works, and have called for real-world testing.
But the Biden administration and other Democrats warn that a U.S. test could trigger a chain reaction of tests by other countries. Over time, they add, a resumption could lead to a nuclear arms race that would destabilize the global balance of terrorism and increase the risk of war.
“It’s a terrible idea,” said Ernest J. Moniz, who oversaw the U.S. nuclear arsenal as energy secretary in the Obama administration. “Further testing would make us less safe. You can’t separate this from the global implications.”
Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico where J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the development of the atomic bomb, said the new tests were a risky trade-off between domestic gains and global losses. “We have more to lose” than America’s nuclear rivals, he said.
It’s unclear whether Trump will act on the testing proposals. In a statement, Trump’s campaign co-chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles did not directly address the candidate’s position on nuclear testing. They said O’Brien, as well as other outside groups and individuals, were “misguided, speaking prematurely, and may well be completely wrong” about plans for a second Trump administration.
Still, Trump’s record of atomic bluster, threats and hard-line policies suggests he might be open to such guidance from his security advisers. In 2018, he boasted that his “nuclear button” was “much bigger and more powerful” than the force controller of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader.
A U.S. detonation would violate the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, long considered one of the most successful arms control measures. Signed by the world’s atomic powers in 1996, the treaty sought 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, with the aim of discovering flaws in weapons designs and verifying their reliability.
Nuclear experts say testing disparities give Washington a military advantage because they prevent other powers from making their arsenals more diverse and lethal.
In 2017, Trump’s presidential inauguration revived the possibility of new tests. In addition to discussing the possibility of restarting them, officials in his administration called for reducing the preparation time for resuming nuclear testing in the United States. The federal agency in charge of the country’s nuclear test site ordered that the time required for preparations be reduced from years to just six months.
Nuclear experts considered the goal unrealistic because testing equipment at the vast site in the Nevada desert had deteriorated or disappeared.
Last year, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, recommended that the United States eliminate preparation time. Its policy guide for conservative presidential candidates urged Washington to “move toward immediate test readiness.”
In his Foreign Affairs article, O’Brien argued that the Biden administration had responded weakly to China’s and Russia’s nuclear weapons buildups. Explosive testing of U.S. weapons, he said, would strengthen the U.S. arsenal and help deter America’s enemies. His article focused on the safety and reliability of the new designs, not those tested during the Cold War.
“It would be remiss to use nuclear weapons of novel designs that we have never tested in the real world,” said Christian Whiton, who served as a State Department adviser in the George W. Bush and Trump administrations and provided background information for O’Brien’s article.
Asked to give examples, Whiton cited two new US weapons that he said needed explosive testing. Both are thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, and both have a much more powerful destructive force than the bomb that levelled Hiroshima.
The first of the bombs mentioned, the W93, will be installed on submarine missiles. The Biden administration announced its development in March 2022 and Whiton called it a “completely new design.”
But the Biden administration’s roadmap for the W93 says otherwise. The warhead, it notes, will be based on “currently deployed and previously tested nuclear designs.” Moreover, its manufacturers, at the Los Alamos laboratory, have insisted that the warhead can be safely and reliably deployed without resorting to further explosive testing.
Charles W. Nakhleh, associate director of the Alamos Weapons Physics Laboratory, said in a Los Alamos publication that alternatives to live detonations “will allow us to use the W93 without additional nuclear testing.”
The other weapon Whiton mentioned is the B61-13, a variant of a bomb first used in 1968. The Biden administration announced its development in October, with Whiton calling it “deeply redesigned.” Still, the official plan says its nuclear parts will be salvaged from an older B61 version and recycled into the new model.
“The idea that this is a major redesign doesn’t hold up,” said Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, a private research organization based in Washington. “They’ve already tested the explosion part.”
However, Whiton believes that even modest changes “would need to be demonstrated in the real world.” He also said the United States would need to develop new warheads to counter an emerging class of super-fast weapons, known as hypersonics, being developed by China and Russia. “New warhead designs are likely to be necessary,” he said, and new testing would be required.
Despite conflicting claims and uncertain election results, nuclear experts say China and Russia are preparing their test sites for new detonations, perhaps in case the United States restarts its program, or alternatively to move forward on their own. Dr. Moniz, a former energy secretary, said he fears Washington will jump the gun if Mr. Trump wins a second term.
Former State Department adviser Whiton cast doubt on the idea that a US detonation would trigger a global chain reaction. He noted that Russia and China were already building up their arsenals without resorting to new tests.
“It is unclear whether current and aspiring nuclear states will follow our example,” he said of a global reaction. “If they do, the downside is that they might marginally improve their capabilities.”
The advantage, according to Whiton, is that the United States could study foreign detonations for clues about their hidden characteristics. It could, for example, monitor the faint rumblings in the bedrock of an underground test to estimate a device’s power.
Mr Whiton added that such readings would, in turn, “help us to appropriately update our deterrence”.
The problem with Whiton’s argument, several nuclear experts say, is its unspoken corollary: that the world could slip into the rounds of costly measures and countermeasures that characterized the Cold War. In this century, they warn, a nuclear arms race could prove more global, innovative, lethal and unpredictable.
“China has much more to gain than we do from resuming testing,” said Dr. Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos. “It would open the door for others to do testing and would reignite an arms race that would endanger the entire world. We should not do it.”
Michael Oro Contributed reporting.
