President Donald Trump's order late Wednesday night for the U.S. to resume nuclear weapons tests has confounded officials and drawn scrutiny from nuclear experts over the safety, feasibility and purpose of kickstarting an effort that has been paused for more than three decades.
But it could still happen.
The U.S. halted nuclear testing in 1992, and almost every other country with atomic weapons has done the same. But the return of a Cold War-era arms race seems suddenly closer amid unraveling disarmament treaties, a push by Russia and China to increase their nuclear stockpiles and a new threat by the U.S. president to restart the effort.
Democrats on Capitol Hill warned Thursday about the dangerous radioactive impacts of resuming testing, while some Republicans cheered the president for seeking to solidify his leverage with adversaries. But safety experts and former officials fear such a move would set off a chain reaction of testing and nuclear proliferation around the world — one the Pentagon’s aging weapons systems may struggle to confront.
“There is no damn reason on the face of this earth to start explosive testing again,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, said in an interview. “We will do everything to stop it.”
Here are five hurdles the U.S. faces in resuming nuclear testing.
We don’t know if Trump is serious.
It’s unclear whether Trump plans to resume explosive nuclear testing or to simply test the missiles that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
"I wouldn't presume that the president's words meant nuclear testing," Vice Adm. Richard Correll, the nominee to lead the military’s top nuclear command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday at his confirmation hearing. "I believe the quote was 'start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis.' Neither China or Russia has conducted a nuclear explosive test. So I'm not reading anything into it or reading anything out."
The debate over resuming nuclear testing has floated through Washington establishment circles since the end of the Cold War. But it picked up steam in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election when Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien made a public push for the Pentagon to resume tests.
“If China and Russia continue to refuse to engage in good-faith arms control talks, the United States should also resume production of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the primary fissile isotopes of nuclear weapons,” he wrote this June in Foreign Affairs magazine.
Trump’s Truth Social post ordering the Pentagon to begin U.S. weapons testing came just after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that the Kremlin had successfully experimented with a torpedo capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. (Trump’s post came minutes before his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, although neither mentioned it afterward.)
Senate Foreign Relations Chair Jim Risch argued that Trump made a strong countermove against Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling.
“Trump was saying, ‘I’m not intimidated, buddy,’” the Idaho Republican said.
The move faces safety issues.
The U.S. has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty but not ratified it. Neither international nor U.S. law prevents Trump from resuming tests.
But the subject has been taboo for years in Washington, in part because open-air nuclear tests from 1945 to 1980 left thousands of people across Arizona, Utah, Nevada and New Mexico sick with cancer and other radioactive illnesses.
While the U.S. largely conducted underground nuclear tests after that point, those experiments can still create radioactive leakage in the air and soil.
The West is scarred from the past.
Rosen, of Nevada, offered some of the most heated pushback to Trump’s announcement, invoking the devastating toll of the state’s previous testing and the potentially destabilizing geopolitical impact.
Nevada, which hosted hundreds of above-ground tests, passed a resolution in May calling on the federal government to maintain its moratorium on testing.
It will “kill and poison your own people,” Rosen said, and begin “a chain of events [that] could lead us to World War III.”
Rosen urged other lawmakers to join in opposition, arguing the radioactive fallout would impact Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico because winds and rain carry it across state lines. The federal government has paid more than $2.7 billion to so-called downwinders, who suffered illnesses as a result of nuclear tests.
We don’t actually need to conduct tests.
U.S. officials may argue it sends a laser-like signal to adversaries, but nuclear experts contend the actual tests aren’t even needed.
The Energy Department has to maintain the ability to resume nuclear testing within 36 months, a requirement established under the Clinton administration, said Paul Dean, vice president for policy at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonproliferation advocacy group.
The government’s top nuclear officials regularly certify that the nuclear stockpile is safe, secure and reliable — without tests. But it is aging. The U.S. is in the process of modernizing most of its nuclear weapons program, including by enhancing the 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles spread across the country.
“They continue to certify in the absence of testing, so there is no need for a resumption of testing,” Dean said, adding that each one would cost $140 million.
But Trump allies argue the U.S. can’t deter Russia or China simply by simulating a nuclear test.
“There is a very important demonstration effect in terms of reminding allies and adversaries alike that the United States is committed to the deterrent that you don't get from running a simulation on a computer screen,” said Alex Gray, who served as National Security Council chief of staff during the first Trump administration.
The Defense Department did not respond to a request for comment.
U.S. allies are unlikely to support it.
Both Trump’s allies and critics see the move as further acknowledgment the U.S. is leaning into an era where nuclear disarmament is no longer a priority.
“It's not about bargaining,” Gray said, “It's about accepting that we're in a more nuclear world and then acting accordingly.”
But Trump’s announcement is a major departure from global norms — and one many allies are unlikely to accept. Only North Korea has conducted nuclear weapons tests since the 1990s, detonating a nuclear device in 2017, during Trump’s first term.
The effort could impact NATO countries and other treaty allies that rely on the American nuclear arsenal for their security. And it comes as negotiations over renewing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia are ramping up ahead of a deadline next year. The New START treaty, which puts caps on the number of nuclear warheads both sides can deploy, is one of the last remaining U.S. arms control treaties still in force.
“We are having a hard time interpreting this and so are the governments in Moscow and Beijing,” Dean said. “This is something that can be easily misconstrued, generate arms race pressure and rapidly evolve into a crisis.”
Paul McLeary and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.
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