US President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing to “equalize” Russia and China’s programs.
The announcement was made in a post on the Truth Social network, on Wednesday (29), in which Trump stated that he had instructed the “War Department” to begin testing “on an equivalent basis” to those in other countries.
Shortly after publication, Trump began a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, in an attempt to seal a truce in the trade war between the world’s two largest economies, in the first meeting between the two leaders since 2019.
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The initiative to resume nuclear tests, however, threatens to reignite geopolitical tensions and end more than three decades of moratorium on explosive tests conducted by the US, suspended since 1992.
Trump’s order was a direct response to Russia’s recent show of force, which claimed to have successfully tested the Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile and Poseidon nuclear torpedo. The Kremlin said the weapons were intended to “guarantee national security.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin even warned Washington in advance about the test. Still, Trump called the Russian announcement “inadequate” and promised that the US would not be left behind.
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Data from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) indicates that Russia today has the largest atomic arsenal in the world, with more than 5,500 warheads, while the US holds around 5,000.
Since 1998, only North Korea has carried out nuclear tests with real explosions. Washington and Moscow had been limiting themselves to computer simulations and “subcritical” tests, which do not produce nuclear explosions.
