President Trump has often thrived on vagueness, demonstrating a deep unwillingness to be pinned down on specifics and forgo maximum leeway in future actions.
But one area where precision matters, a lot, is when presidents talk about their plans for America’s nuclear weapons. And this weekend, the president and his energy secretary, who oversees the development and maintenance of the nuclear stockpile, contradicted each other on the critical question of whether the United States is about to break the three-decade taboo on explosive testing of nuclear weapons.
In short, Mr. Trump has doubled down on the concept that he has ordered a resumption of explosive nuclear testing — which the United States has refrained from for 33 years — to match what he contends were secret nuclear underground detonations, presumably by Russia, China, and other nuclear-armed states. But that claim has been rejected by many nuclear experts and Mr. Trump’s own nominee to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for America’s ground-based, undersea and bomber-launched nuclear weapons.
“They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test,” Mr. Trump said in an interview that was recorded on Friday with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” without specifying which countries he was talking about. “You feel a little bit of a vibration. They test, and we don’t test. We have to test.”
On Sunday, Chris Wright, Mr. Trump’s energy secretary, appeared to contradict Mr. Trump when he indicated the United States has no intention of conducting new explosive tests, and would simply continue its regular testing of nuclear components and systems to ensure they are working properly.
“These will be nonnuclear explosions,” Mr. Wright said on “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News. “These are just developing sophisticated systems so that our replacement nuclear weapons are even better than the ones they were before.”
The mixed messages have amounted to an extraordinary situation in which the president, who is followed everywhere by an aide carrying the “nuclear football” with nuclear codes and options, cannot get on the same page with one of his top cabinet officials on how the U.S. government is handling one of the most destructive weapons in the world.
Detonation tests of nuclear warheads were a frequent feature of the Cold War, first in aboveground tests in the 1950s and ’60s, and then in underground explosions. But they are no longer commonplace and all the major superpowers have largely abided by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, even though it has never been formally ratified and put into force.
The United States has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992, and with a few exceptions — such as India and Pakistan in 1998 — others have abided by the test ban too.
But Mr. Trump may have been referring to an ongoing, if still classified, argument within the intelligence agencies and national laboratories about whether China and Russia have conducted what amount to small tests. By some interpretations, such tests have involved self-sustaining nuclear reactions — known in the nuclear world as “critical” tests. The evidence is vague, and experts disagree on the quality of the evidence.
Some have argued the United States should match those tests.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, posted on social media that Mr. Trump “was right” in his assertions about Russian and Chinese nuclear testing. Mr. Ratcliffe’s post referred to a 2020 Wall Street Journal article on suspected Chinese nuclear tests on a small scale, and comments from a 2019 speech from the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency that Russia was “probably not adhering to the nuclear testing moratorium” and that Russian testing had created “nuclear yield.”
C.I.A. officials declined to comment on Mr. Ratcliffe’s post.
But Mr. Wright’s reference to “nonnuclear explosions” and “noncritical explosions” appeared to rule out the possibility that the United States was planning to conduct similar tests.
The only nation that has conducted full, explosive nuclear tests in the past quarter-century is North Korea, and its last one was in September 2017.
Even before his “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Trump, while on diplomatic trip to Asia, declared on Truth Social that he had ordered the “Department of War,” as he calls the Department of Defense, to resume testing. The posting took his own aides by surprise, officials said. (It also included an error — it is the Energy Department, not the Pentagon, that is responsible for such testing.)
The timing of the social media post was striking, just minutes before his meeting with President Xi Jinping of China.
Then, on Friday, during the interview with CBS at his Florida residence and club, Mr. Trump indicated again that the United States would be detonating the nuclear warheads as a part of the testing for the first time in decades.
“Are you saying that after more than 30 years, the United States is going to start detonating nuclear weapons for testing?” asked Norah O’Donnell, the veteran CBS reporter and anchor.
“I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes,” Mr. Trump answered. Ms. O’Donnell then reminded Mr. Trump that the only nation that had tested a nuclear warhead recently was North Korea. Russia had recently tested delivery systems, but not warheads themselves.
Mr. Trump rejected that assertion and claimed Russia and China had secretly been testing nuclear weapons without the knowledge of the global network of nuclear experts, scientists and allies who would most likely detect such a dramatic move.
“You just don’t know about it,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump’s comments about an explosive nuclear testing appeared to surprise others in his administration. Just a day before he asserted Russia and China were conducting underground nuclear explosions, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, Navy Vice Adm. Richard Correll, told Congress he was “Neither China nor Russia has conducted a nuclear explosive test.”
Matthew Bunn, a Harvard professor focusing on nuclear weapons, said it was “distressing when the guy with his finger on the button” did not appear to be in lock step with his top federal officials when it came to speaking publicly about nuclear weapons.
“It makes everyone afraid when the guy in charge of America’s nuclear weapons doesn’t appear to know what he’s talking about,” Mr. Bunn said.
A White House spokeswoman on Monday declined to answer questions about Mr. Trump’s claim that China and Russia were conducting underground explosions, or the break between his and Mr. Wright’s statements. The spokeswoman referred back to Mr. Trump’s interview.
Ben Dietderich, a spokesman for the Energy Department, also declined to answer specific questions on the testing ordered by Mr. Trump, saying instead that Mr. Wright “is proudly following President Trump’s direction to expand nuclear testing.”
American officials would not describe the nature of the U.S. intelligence on Chinese or Russian testing, so as not to undermine the U.S. ability to collect that information in the future. But officials said tracking secret testing programs, particularly ones that violate Western standards, has long been a top priority of American intelligence agencies.
The debate over testing comes at a critical moment in the renewal of the American arsenal. Since the Obama administration, the government has been struggling with an effort to replace nuclear warheads — and its entire ground-based nuclear missile deterrent — with updated weapons. The programs have been mired in delays and cost overruns.
Not surprisingly, the effort to build new versions of nuclear warheads has prompted arguments over whether full testing must be conducted to assure that the updated systems work. Mr. Wright’s statement that the administration would be able to test the systems without conducting full nuclear detonations appeared to be part of that debate.
“It looked like he tried to right the ship and save the president’s face at the same time,” said John F. Tierney, the executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation and a former Democratic congressman representing Massachusetts.
The concern now, according to Mr. Tierney, is whether Mr. Trump continues his push to detonate nuclear weapons as a part of testing, and whether that provokes other nations to do the same.
“Why would we want to open the Pandora’s box to give other nuclear states the excuse to go testing?” Mr. Tierney asked.
Julian Barnes contributed reporting.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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