President Trump’s comments about restarting weapons tests are not likely to lead to mushroom-cloud explosions over the New Mexico desert or seismic shaking underground in Nevada, according to the nation’s foremost experts.
But questions about what kind of testing Mr. Trump does have in mind have been rippling through the nuclear nonproliferation community. In an interview on “60 Minutes,” the president elaborated on remarks he made last week announcing a plan to resume U.S. testing of nuclear weapons. “Other countries are testing,” he said. “We’re the only country that doesn’t test, and I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test.”
The president did not clarify what type of testing he envisions. The U.S. has not conducted above-ground nuclear tests since the 1960s, and the last underground detonation of a nuclear device in the U.S. occurred in 1992. That test, at the Nevada Test Site, was the final nuclear weapons test before the current testing moratorium was put in place.
Asked if he was announcing that after more than 30 years, the United States planned to start detonating nuclear weapons for testing, Mr. Trump replied that “we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.”
“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it,” he said. “You know, we’re an open society. We’re different. We talk about it… We’re going to test, because they test and others test. And certainly North Korea’s been testing. Pakistan’s been testing.”
On Monday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe posted a brief statement on his personal X account that said President Trump “is right,” and showed images related to public U.S. assessments from 2019 by the Defense Intelligence Agency that Russia and China were carrying out low-yield nuclear tests.
Low-yield tests involve very small nuclear explosions that can help researchers study a weapon’s efficacy, but are generally banned under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The U.S., China and Russia are signatories to that treaty, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1996, but have not ratified it.
There was no mention in Ratcliffe’s post of actions by Pakistan or North Korea.
The CIA declined to comment beyond the director’s post.
The White House referred a question about clarifying the president’s comments on nuclear testing to what Mr. Trump has said.
Nine countries — the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India and Israel — currently possess a combined total of more than 12,000 nuclear warheads, with the U.S. and Russia accounting for nearly 90% of the global stockpile, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
The U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 worldwide threat assessment said Russia’s nuclear stockpile was the world’s “largest and most diverse,” noting that it, in combination with an array of delivery systems, “could inflict catastrophic damage to the Homeland.”
The assessment also said China “remains intent” on expanding its nuclear posture.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told reporters during a press briefing Monday that as a “responsible nuclear-weapons state, China has always … upheld a self-defense nuclear strategy and abided by its commitment to suspend nuclear testing.” And a senior Pakistani security official told CBS News, “Pakistan was not the first to carry out nuclear tests and will not be the first to resume nuclear tests.”
George Perkovich, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Nuclear Policy Program, said experts on nuclear weapons testing believe the president was referencing “subcritical” tests, rather than tests that register on the Richter Scale or yield a visible display.
“These don’t produce an explosion. They can be done in laboratories,” Perkovich said.
Subcritical nuclear tests involve perfecting the final steps in triggering a chain reaction in the lab, and then using computing power to conduct simulations of an actual detonation.
“Because he kept insisting that everyone else is doing it, I am assuming he means those types of tests that don’t involve explosions,” Perkovich said. “If these countries have been doing [explosive] tests, then the president just released very highly classified intelligence.”
Sigfried Hecker, who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 to 1997, said the Russians, Chinese and the U.S. all perform subcritical experiments. But another type of nuclear test that the U.S. stopped conducting, called Hydronuclear experiments, involves a tiny amount of explosive – not enough to be detected by seismic monitors.
“These are where you barely tickle the bomb, and you get small nuclear reactions,” Hecker said. “No mushroom cloud. You’re just doing enough to produce a reaction in the plutonium. No risk, no hazard, easily contained. No safety issues.”
Hecker said he did not know if the president might be referring to that type of test.
“Whether the president and his advisers are steeped in all of this, I don’t know,” he said.
Samantha Vinograd, a national security expert and CBS News consultant who served as assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the US Department of Homeland Security said “there are various kinds of tests that the president could be referring to so there are currently a lot of hypotheticals.”
The White House referred a question about clarifying the president’s comments about nuclear testing to what Mr. Trump has said.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright tried to clarify Mr. Trump’s nuclear comments in an appearance on Fox News, saying the president was referencing “systems tests.”
“These are not nuclear explosions,” Wright said. “These are what we call noncritical explosions, so we’re testing all the other parts of a nuclear weapon.”
As energy secretary, Wright is helping oversee the modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, which he said the president has made a “critical priority.”
“A lot of our weapons are very old and President Trump has been adamant about we have to be on the forefront, we need to be ahead of our adversaries, we need to keep our weapon stockpile modern and upgraded,” Wright said.
If the U.S. does begin nuclear testing again, China would benefit the most, according to Heather Williams, the director of the Project on Nuclear Issues and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The United States has conducted 1,054 tests, and Russia has conducted 715. China only conducted 47 nuclear tests, both above ground and underground,” Williams said on Saturday.
“This asymmetry in test data has been a sore spot for Chinese officials who felt disadvantaged by arms control agreements, such as the Partial Test Ban Treaty. If one country returns to nuclear testing, others are likely to follow — in which case, China would stand to gain the most in terms of weapons design and warhead information, further contributing to its nuclear buildup,” said Williams.
However, Williams also underscored that both political and scientific leaders have repeatedly said that the U.S. has no technical need to return to nuclear testing.
James LaPorta and
contributed to this report.
The post What experts say about Trump’s plans to restart nuclear testing appeared first on CBS News.
