“Right after I graduated, I interned with the Arms Control Association. It was terrific.”
Trump Says U.S. Will Resume Nuclear Testing
November 2025
President Donald Trump said the United States would resume nuclear testing after 33 years, a move that could provoke other major nuclear-armed countries to follow suit and accelerate a new arms race.
“We’ve halted [testing] many years ago, but with others doing testing I think it's appropriate to do so,” Trump told reporters Oct. 30 aboard Air Force One.
But on Nov. 2, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the testing ordered by Trump will not involve nuclear explosions at this time.
“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests.... These are what we call non-critical explosions,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
Some 187 countries, including the United States and the four other major nuclear powers, have signed the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which bans nuclear weapon testing, and are legally bound to observe it.
U.S. President Bill Clinton voluntarily halted testing in 1992 at the end of the Cold War. The Soviet tested its last nuclear weapon in 1990 and China, in 1996.
Earlier this year Brandon Williams, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told Congress, “I would not advise testing.” He expressed confidence in the scientific experiments and supercomputer simulations that are used instead to ensure U.S. bombs still work.
In this century, only North Korea has conducted a nuclear test explosion and none recently. All such tests are monitored worldwide by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO).
Robert Floyd, CTBTO executive secretary, said Oct. 30 that ”any nuclear weapon test by any state would be harmful and destabilizing for global nonproliferation efforts and for international peace and security.”
“The CTBTO monitoring system stands ready to detect any such test and provide the data to other CTBT states signatories,” he said in a statement.
Responding to Trump’s announcement on social media, U.S. Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) said: “Absolutely not. I’ll be introducing legislation to put a stop to this.” The Nevada National Security Site, in her home state, is the only place where the United States could do nuclear testing.
Since 1945, there have been 2,056 nuclear test explosions worldwide, 1,030 of which were conducted by the United States.—CAROL GIACOMO