Will nuclear weapons testing make a comeback under a second Trump presidency? Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California, certainly hopes not. In an article posted in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, Lewis argues that a resumption of nuclear testing would be bad for the U.S. and the world.
Lewis reports that Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, made “the startling suggestion” that the United States should resume the practice of exploding nuclear weapons underneath the Nevada desert in an earlier essay also in Foreign Affairs. “The United States has to maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles,” O’Brien wrote. “To do so, Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992—not just by using computer models.”
This is the argument that Lewis refutes. His argument is that at the present stage of nuclear weapons developments, the U.S. is way ahead of both China and Russia for two reasons. One is that because the U.S. conducted far more nuclear tests during the Cold War than China and Russia combined—the U.S., 1,149; Russia, 969 and China, 45—it has far more data on how nuclear devices actually perform than anyone else. Secondly, the U.S. is also way ahead of China and Russia on the technologies for evaluating the performance of nuclear devices—though no longer ahead of China in supercomputing—and thus its data are far more reliable than what either China or Russia have. Therefore, should the U.S. resume testing, rather than enabling the U.S. to get ahead, it would actually give Russia and China the chance to catch up, since they would almost certainly resume testing as well because they have much more to learn from testing than the U.S. does.
