Allies and former advisers to former President Donald Trump are arguing that the U.S., for the first time in decades, should resume nuclear testing. They say it’ll advance American safety by ensuring that the U.S. has a decisive military and technological advantage over other nuclear powers. In reality, the U.S. — and the world — would be made more dangerous by the kind of arms race this could spark. And it seems plausible that if Trump were to win the White House he could adopt the policy because of the manner in which it aligns with the unilateral militance of the “America First” worldview.
Influential figures in Trump's orbit are pushing the idea of breaking long-held norms and resuming live nuclear testing. Former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien wrote in Foreign Affairs in June that “Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992” in order to maintain technical superiority over China and Russia. Christian Whiton, who served as a State Department adviser to President George W. Bush and Trump, told The New York Times that “it would be negligent to field nuclear weapons of novel designs that we have never tested in the real world.” And the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that’s backing Project 2025, widely considered a policy blueprint for Trump’s second term, is proposing that the federal government expand its capacity for immediate nuclear testing.
Resuming explosive testing would dangerously encourage a new arms race.
Since 1992, the U.S. has refrained from explosive nuclear testing and opted for other techniques, including expert appraisals and sophisticated modeling generated by supercomputers, to calculate the efficacy of its long-term stockpile and its newer weapons. That policy has helped nudge other countries away from pursuing live testing. Most countries don’t conduct live tests of nuclear warheads in adherence to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
Multiple nuclear proliferation experts say that if the U.S. resumes explosive testing, other countries will have more incentive to do so. “Resuming U.S. nuclear testing is technically and militarily unnecessary,” wrote Arms Control Association executive director Daryl Kimball in response to O’Brien’s article. “Moreover, it would lead to a global chain reaction of nuclear testing, raise global tensions, and blow apart global nonproliferation efforts at a time of heightened nuclear danger.” Kimball’s argument is in line with President Joe Biden’s outlook. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden endorsed the U.S. continuing to abstain from explosive testing and said a resumption would be “as reckless as it is dangerous.”
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California, has suggested that resuming live testing would backfire. It would cause the U.S. to lose the margin of advantage it has in its superior knowledge of its own arsenal. “When the test ban happened, the US had done more than 1,000 explosions and had the most advanced computing capabilities in the world, so we had the best data and the best computers, and we were in a position of enormous advantage relative to the Russians, and certainly relative to the Chinese,” Lewis told The Guardian. He added that if it were to resume testing, the U.S. would learn “very little” about its weapons relative to Russia and China.
Trump’s team has not adopted a plan to resume testing, nor has it ruled it out. (In a statement to the Times, Trump’s campaign managers more broadly rejected the idea of people outside the campaign as “misguided, speaking prematurely” about what a second term might look like.) But during his time in office, Trump reportedly did discuss the possibility of resuming live nuclear testing, and it’s plausible that he could pursue it, particularly if he staffs up again with old advisers who favor the policy.
Resuming explosive nuclear testing would align with Trump’s foreign policy outlook. He is a fan of unilateralism and displays of militance as a strategy for signaling the U.S.’s pre-eminence as a global power. We saw that tendency expressed in Trump’s time in office with his withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, his emphasis on requesting gigantic defense budgets, his yearning for military parades and his push-pull relationship with NATO.
Resuming explosive testing would dangerously encourage a new arms race and possibly assist the U.S.’s nuclear rivals in closing the technological gap more rapidly than they otherwise would. But it would allow Trump to thump his chest about U.S. military supremacy and demonstrate machismo to his base. America First, Trump First: Neither is good for American safety or global safety, but it would make Trump look tough.
