President Donald Trump said on his Truth Social account Wednesday he ordered the Pentagon to “immediately” begin the process of testing nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with Russia and China.
Trump’s announcement came around an hour before he was set to meet with Chinese president Xi Jinping. It also came the day before Vice Adm. Richard Correll, Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) that is responsible for employing the nation’s nuclear arsenal, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Thursday.
“Because of other countries[’] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump said on Truth Social. “That process will begin immediately.”
What does this mean?
It is unclear what Trump means by this. China’s last publicly-known conducted nuclear test was in 1996, and Russia’s was in 1990, though Moscow withdrew from the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 2023. However, a 2022 report by the State Department accused Russia of conducting critical nuclear tests in violation of the zero-yield standard, and a 2019 Defense Intelligence Agency report alleged similarly. There have also been satellite images of Russia expanding its Novaya Zemlya nuclear facilities.
The last publicly-known nuclear explosive test was by North Korea in 2017.
Additionally, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous agency that works closely with STRATCOM and is in charge of maintaining and modernizing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, would be in charge of nuclear tests instead of the Pentagon. It would take NNSA 24 to 36 months to plan and conduct an underground nuclear explosive test if directed by the president, but six to ten months for a simple test, as part of the agency’s Stockpile Stewardship Program.
What does Congress think?
Trump’s post got a very partisan split of responses, at least from the Senators present at the SASC hearing. When questioned on his thoughts on Trump’s announcement and whether it would be “destabilizing” for relations with China and Russia, Correll simply responded, “if confirmed, as the commander of STRATCOM, my role would be to provide military advice on any discussions” on nuclear testing. “You have my assurance that I would do that to the best of my ability together with a team of subject matter experts to provide this committee and policy makers informed analysis from a military perspective” on any adjustments “to our testing.”
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), in the halls of the Capitol to a quorum of reporters, advised the U.S. “keep the temperature down,” especially if the country is not expanding the nuclear arsenal.
“The Russians certainly are a problem right now with some of the things they’ve done recently. But testing the warhead itself is something we do not need to do,” Kelly said. “ And when the president says something like that, if we were to test a nuclear warhead and the Chinese start doing it, it just helps the Chinese.” China, notably, did not sign the 1963 treaty, and has conducted only 47 known nuclear tests, compared to 1,054 by the U.S. and 715 by Russia.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Trump “might have launched us on the path of a new arms race.” Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), who has the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) in her state, said “I will not let this happen, not on my watch.”
“During this era [1951-1992 when nuclear weapons were tested above and underground in Nevada], which we must not return to, millions of people and acres of land were contaminated by radiation and my state of Nevada is still suffering the consequences,” Rosen said. “We like to say in Nevada, ‘what happens in Las Vegas stays in Vegas.’ But if you start those explosive nuclear tests I can tell you this: every bit of air, every bit of groundwater, every bit of soil across these United States will be contaminated with radiation and everyone in this country will suffer, not just the people of Nevada.”
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) said the post was a “consequential announcement” and asked Correll if commencing testing would require an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, meaning a thorough review and analysis with a public comment period through the National Environmental Policy Act. Correll responded he wouldn’t “presume” that Trump meant an explosive nuclear weapons test given he said it would be “on an equal basis” with China and Russia, both of which have not conducted explosive nuclear weapons tests to public knowledge.
Independent Sen.r Angus King (Maine) strayed from his Democrat colleagues by saying it was possible Trump was referring to testing “delivery systems,” similar to Russia’s recent testing of nuclear delivery systems like the Poseiden and the nuclear-powered cruise missile. Republican lawmakers said similarly, including Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), who said “we essentially test every other system we have in a full scale test environment,” including the nuclear capabilities such as the legs of the nuclear triad, or the carriers of the nuclear weapons.
“Every leg of the triad is tested rigorously, and I have absolute confidence those systems will perform if we need them to perform,” Correll agreed.
While Sheehy said he thought models and software were “great,” referring to NNSA software, “things go wrong at the bottom of the ocean” and in the air and in space, he said. “Models always tell us things will go great… Unfortunately sometimes physics tells us otherwise.”
Sheehy added he thought “much ado” is being made “about the president’s comments yesterday which simply are saying a lot of other countries are conducting nuclear tests of various kinds, whether they be delivery vehicle tests, aircraft tests, or full scale explosions… That doesn’t mean we’re going to start blowing up nukes outside of Las Vegas every other day, doesn’t mean we’re going to be dropping nukes over Fiji, it means we’re going to be testing on an equal basis.”
Sheehy said he didn’t think that was “at all an unreasonable position to make” and that it was an “extremely reasonable ask of our military.”
When questioned by the Exchange Monitor in the halls of the Capitol, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), whose state is home to the STRATCOM headquarters, said, “on my side of the aisle, I would stick with those comments, and I thought the Admiral had a good answer on how he viewed them as well.”
Fischer added she thought responses from her Democrat colleagues were “quite extreme.”
If NNSA doesn’t test nuclear weapons, how does it certify the nuclear arsenal?
The U.S. stopped testing nuclear weapons aboveground and underwater in 1963 through the Limited Test Ban Treaty, along with the U.K. and the then-Soviet Union. The U.S. has not tested nuclear weapons at full yield since 1992 and has only conducted subcritical, zero-yield experiments in a self-imposed moratorium that roughly mirrors the provisions of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the country has not ratified. This means chemical explosives are used to shock nuclear materials like plutonium in a confined environment, but the quantity of nuclear material and the chemical release of the reaction is too small that a nuclear reaction cannot begin the way it would in a critical nuclear test.
NNSA conducts these experiments underground at the NNSS and in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. NNSA’s labs then collect data from the experiment and compare it to data from pre-1992 nuclear tests using supercomputers, like the ones NVIDIA and HPE are building for Los Alamos National Laboratory.
While the last publicly known subcritical experiments were conducted in May 2024, test site officials told the Exchange Monitor in December 2024 on a media trip to NNSS that the next subcritical experiment was slated for April 2025. Previously-acting administrator of NNSA Teresa Robbins did not comment to the Monitor when asked whether the testing happened.
“What we are doing in Nevada is working,” Rosen said at the SASC hearing, and Correl said he trusts the annual certification of the arsenal by NNSA and NNSS through subcritical experiments.
During Trump’s second presidential campaign, some of his former advisers came out in support of a readiness to return to testing nuclear weapons at a critical level. Project 2025, a conservative policy document released over the summer of 2024 and written by former Trump administration advisers, listed in its “needed reforms” that a “readiness to test nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site [will] ensure the ability of the U.S. to respond quickly to asymmetric technology surprises.”
Trump’s former national security advisor Robert O’brien also argued in an op-ed for Foreign Affairs magazine that the U.S. should ignore the 1992 treaty as long as China and Russia refused to engage in peace talks with the U.S.
Meanwhile, in the confirmation hearing of Brandon Williams, the newly sworn-in head of NNSA, Williams said he would “not advise” returning to critical testing, and should instead rely on the scientific data of 928 critical nuclear weapons tests performed by the United States in Nevada specifically in the past.
NNSA did not respond to a query from the Monitor on Trump’s announcement.