Donald Trump & Energy Secretary Chris Wright (File photos)
US President Donald Trump has ordered fresh tests of the American nuclear weapons system, sparking questions on whether the United States is preparing to resume nuclear explosions after more than three decades. The announcement was made on social media last week and followed by remarks ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. However, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Sunday clarified that the testing would not involve nuclear explosions but would instead focus on “the other parts of a nuclear weapon” to ensure they are working properly.
Wright’s comments came four days after Trump declared that he was ordering the US military to resume nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with other countries, raising the spectre of a return to the worst days of the Cold War. “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are systems tests,” Wright said in an interview on the Fox News show The Sunday Briefing. “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.” Wright said Americans in places such as Nevada, where the United States has a nuclear test site bigger than the state of Rhode Island, should not expect to see a mushroom cloud. On Wednesday — minutes before he met with President Xi Jinping of China in South Korea — Trump said in a social media post that he was ordering the Pentagon to step up testing of nuclear weapons. “We’ve halted it years — many years — ago,” Trump later told reporters, referring to the last US explosive test of a nuclear weapon in 1992. “But with others doing testing, I think it is appropriate that we do also.”Wright reiterated that testing was underway on the new nuclear systems. “And again, these will be nonnuclear explosions,” he said, adding, “These are just developing sophisticated systems so that our replacement nuclear weapons are even better than the ones they were before.”The confusion over Trump’s intentions began just minutes before his key meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. Posting on his Truth Social platform, Trump appeared to signal that he was preparing to end the decades-long US moratorium on testing nuclear weapons.Later that day, as he returned to Washington, the President remained evasive about whether he was ordering the resumption of full-scale nuclear detonations — a practice seen only in North Korea this century — or referring instead to routine tests of the systems used to deliver such weapons.Detonation tests are no longer common. The only nation that has been regularly conducting nuclear tests in the past quarter-century is North Korea, whose last test was in September 2017. China has rapidly expanded its nuclear stockpile and deployed missiles in new silos but has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. Russia has not conducted a confirmed test since 1990, although it recently declared that it had tested two new delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons — a nuclear-powered cruise missile and an undersea torpedo, called Poseidon, capable of crossing the Pacific to the US West Coast. The United States itself routinely tests unarmed missiles. In 1993, the Clinton administration announced plans for a treaty under which nations would forgo nuclear blasts. Although the 1996 test-ban treaty never officially entered into force, it established a global norm of not testing destructive bombs. Washington is currently undertaking a major effort to replace its warheads with updated versions. The overall cost of the sprawling programme over three decades is estimated at $1.7 trillion.
