Allies of Donald Trump are proposing that the United States restart the testing of nuclear weapons in underground detonations should the former president be reelected in November. A number of nuclear experts reject such a resumption as unnecessary and say it would threaten to end a testing moratorium that the world’s major atomic powers have honored for decades.
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Robert C. O’Brien, a former national security adviser to Trump, urges him to conduct nuclear tests if he wins a new term. Washington, he wrote, "must test new nuclear weapons for 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 to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles.”
At the Cold War’s end, in 1992, the United States gave up the explosive testing of nuclear arms and eventually talked other atomic powers into doing likewise. The U.S. instead turned to experts and machines at the nation’s weapons labs to verify the lethality of the country’s arsenal. Today the machines include room-size supercomputers, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine and a system of lasers the size of a sports stadium.
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