Trump's nuclear testing order could accelerate atomic arms race and help rivals

A resumption of nuclear weapons testing by the US would accelerate a continuing arms race and result in rival powers improving the quality and quantity of their own atomic arsenals, experts have warned.

US President Donald Trump on Thursday said he had told the Pentagon to “immediately” begin the process of starting nuclear tests, upending decades of established norms.

With the exception of North Korea, no country has conducted an explosive nuclear weapons test in more than a quarter century. Russia last tested a bomb in 1990, the US in 1992 and China in 1996.

Mr Trump's rationale is that the US must test its weapons to ensure it stays apace of competitors as they rush to increase their arsenals.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said Russia had tested a Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo that scientists say could cause vast radioactive ocean swells. That came three days after he praised a successful test of a new nuclear-powered cruise missile.

“With others doing testing, I think it's appropriate that we do also,” Mr Trump said aboard Air Force One, adding that nuclear test sites would be determined later.

But Russia has not been testing nuclear warheads, only the missiles that would carry them.

“President Trump mentioned in his statement that other countries are engaged in testing nuclear weapons. Until now, we didn't know that anyone was testing,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

The US has been a signatory since 1996 to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes. But it did not actually ratify the agreement, and in 2023, Mr Putin rescinded Russia's own ratification of the treaty.

The US has more than 3,000 warheads in its active arsenal, with Russia maintaining a similar number. Another 1,500 US warheads or so are in the process of being dismantled.

China, meanwhile, has more than doubled its arsenal to an estimated 600 nuclear weapons in 2025, from 300 weapons in 2020, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

It said US military officials estimate that China would have more than 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030.

Xiaodon Liang, the senior policy analyst for nuclear weapons policy and disarmament at the Arms Control Association, said new tests would accelerate the nuclear arms race.

“The resumption of nuclear testing would allow many states to improve the quality of their weapons, and when that happens, other states will respond with increases in quantity,” he told The National.

“China, in particular, has a lot to learn from testing, whereas the United States has very little to learn, because we conducted almost 1,000 tests.”

“It's shooting ourselves in the foot if we were to resume testing now,” he added.

Mr Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to resume testing, but America’s nuclear arsenal is maintained by the Energy Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within it – not the Defence Department.

The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Pentagon declined to comment.

The most obvious place for a new weapons test would be at the Nevada National Security Site, about 120km north-west of Las Vegas.

But Representative Dina Titus, a Democratic representative from Nevada, has condemned Mr Trump's move, saying on X that she would be introducing legislation “to put a stop to this.”

Mr Liang said it would take at least three years to conduct a nuclear test that is “fully instrumented", meaning scientists could extract maximum data from the explosion.

But “if the United States wanted to conduct a demonstration test purely for political reasons, that could be done faster", he said.

William Hartung, a senior research fellow who focuses on the arms industry and US military budget at the Washington think tank the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, pointed to the health risks that accompany tests. He also said the world should be denuclearising, not going the other way.

“The process of developing, building and maintaining nuclear weapons has cost lives and inflicted severe health conditions on large numbers of people worldwide due to the legacies of uranium mining and nuclear testing,” he said in an email.

“We are already in the midst of a three-way arms race among Russia, the United States and China. A resumption in testing of nuclear warheads would make this unstable situation worse, possibly far worse.”