The latest report that high-level U.S. officials have discussed a return to nuclear explosive testing stirred the usual sentiments of incredulity and puzzlement over the Memorial Day weekend, when some issue watchers wondered what such a development should or even could look like.
The Washington Post reported Friday that a high-level White House official said people in the Donald Trump administration on May 15 discussed a “rapid [nuclear] test.” Such a test would demonstrate to Russia and China that the U.S. can indeed do such a thing. The source told the Post that the move might prove useful as leverage in arms control negotiations with Moscow and Beijing.
The newspaper said there was “serious” disagreement about the need to test a nuclear weapon, particularly from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which participated in the May 15 meeting. The semiautonomous Department of Energy agency on Monday morning declined to comment on the report.
The United States has not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but has maintained a voluntary moratorium on nuclear testing since the early 1990s.
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, though, says “the United States must remain ready to resume nuclear testing if necessary to meet severe technological or geopolitical challenges.”
Currently, however,“DOE/NNSA assumes that a test would be conducted only when the President has declared a national emergency or other similar contingency and only after any necessary waiver of applicable statutory and regulatory restrictions,” according to the NNSA’s 2020 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan: the annual unclassified summary of the agency’s ongoing nuclear-weapon work.
If the president calls for a nuclear explosive test, the NNSA would have to be ready to fire the shot sometime between two and three years after the order comes down, according to the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan. The source of the order-to-test deadline is a presidential directive from the Clinton administration, the says.
“The problem with the idea of doing a test of a nuclear device is where to do it,” Cheryl Rofer, a former chemist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, wrote on Twitter. “There just aren’t big enough spaces. And would the test be underground? That requires a lot of drilling and instrumentation that would pretty much have to be invented from scratch.”
Amy Woolaf, a staffer at the Congressional Research Service who focuses on nuclear weapons, mused on Twitter that the administration could, if it really wanted to, simply “pop one [test] off” — possibly even in the atmosphere. International optics might be the only effect of such a one-off, Woolaf speculated.
“Besides, NNSA really wants a lot more money for the enterprise — new production, new facilities, etc.,” Woolaf wrote. “Funding this adrenaline rush would be a distraction, at best, and, more likely, a disruption.”
The NNSA has requested a roughly $20 billion budget for fiscal 2021, which begins Oct. 1.
