It is often difficult to discern the exact meaning of President Trump’s public statements. He does not consider words carefully, being a politician of pure and visceral instinct, but he is also not especially articulate, and this can produce ambiguous jumbles of language. Last week, minutes before he met President Xi Jinping of China at Busan Airport in South Korea, Trump made an extraordinary statement on his Truth Social platform:
The United States has more Nuclear Weapons than any other country… Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.
Much of the standard Trumpian bluster can be cut away; in fact, most authorities agree that Russia has more nuclear warheads than the United States, albeit by a slender margin, but the President is correct that China is some way behind in third. The Federation of Atomic Scientists puts Russia’s total arsenal at 5,449 warheads, America’s at 5,277 and estimates China has 600.
If Trump’s Truth Social post was political bluster, it is reckless and self-harming
But what did Trump mean by ‘testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis’? It seems likely he was prompted at least in part by Russia’s announcement a few days before that it had recently tested its 9M 370 Burevestnik nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile. (One former US State Department official called it ‘a uniquely stupid weapon system, a flying Chernobyl’.) The test was, however, only of the missile, not of the nuclear warhead it delivers.
The most obvious interpretation of President Trump’s words suggests more than this: resuming the detonation of actual warheads. This would be a hugely significant step: the United States has not conducted a nuclear test since 23 September 1992 at the underground Nevada test site. Further tests would be in breach of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (although America has never ratified the treaty to which it is a signatory).
Why does the President want to do this? Norah O’Donnell put precisely this question to him on CBS’s 60 Minutes at the weekend.
Well, because you have to see how they work. You know, you do have to – and the reason I’m saying – testing is because Russia announced that they were gonna be doing a test. If you notice, North Korea’s testing constantly. Other countries are testing. We’re the only country that doesn’t test, and I wanna be – I don’t wanna be the only country that doesn’t test.
This seems to be the genesis of his phrase ‘on equal terms’. With his usual defensive suspicion, Trump believes he and the United States are somehow being taken advantage of by the rest of the world and he cannot abide that notion. But there is no evidence that Russia or China have tested warheads for many years: the last Soviet test was at Novaya Zemlya in October 1990 and China conducted its most recent test at Lop Nur in July 1996. North Korea has carried out six nuclear weapons tests but the last was in September 2017. President Trump contradicted this on 60 Minutes:
Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it… they test and others test. And certainly North Korea’s been testing. Pakistan’s been testing.
There is no evidence of this and ongoing testing of warheads has not previously been credibly suggested. We can all make our own judgement of Trump’s reliability and truthfulness, but renewed American testing would be provocative and might encourage other countries to follow suit.
It is not clear how the United States would carry out such tests. Much of the infrastructure is in disrepair; it is estimated that the Nevada test site would take 36 months to restore to operational status and recruit the necessary specialist staff after Doge-inspired reductions at the Pentagon, costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
Perhaps the President does not know or care about this. He fails to grasp that the moratorium on nuclear testing handed the United States a significant advantage: since the Trinity test of the very first atomic bomb in 1945, America undertook 1,054 tests, while the Soviet Union only carried out 715 and China a mere 45. So America has a greater volume of data, and the computer simulations on which it now relies are likely to be far more sophisticated than those of its adversaries.
If Trump’s Truth Social post was political bluster, it is reckless and self-harming. It is in America’s interests to maintain a nuclear test moratorium; giving Russia and China an excuse to resume testing would offer them the opportunity to make up ground.
These are dangerous times. This year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its doomsday clock forward to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Dealing with weapons which are a genuinely existential threat required a cool head, patience and clarity of thought. President Trump has none of these, and is at risk of escalating the situation further through sheer carelessness and ignorance.
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