Both Vice President J.D. Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have endorsed President Trump’s Wednesday night statement on Oct. 29 about the U.S. resuming nuclear testing. “Sometimes you’ve got to test it to make sure that it’s functioning and working properly,” Vance told reporters outside the White House on Oct. 30. “We’ve been working very closely even with nations that we don’t have the best relations with to try to limit nuclear proliferation. The president’s going to keep on working on that. But it’s an important part of American national security to make sure that this nuclear arsenal we have actually functions properly and that’s part of a testing regime. To be clear, we know that it does work properly, but you got to keep on top of it over time and the president just wants to make sure that we do that.”
“The commander in chief wants us to be fully prepared. We are the last great superpower on the Earth. China intends to be a near peer-to-peer advisory to us. But in order to maintain peace around the world, you have to show strength, and that’s what the president believes in. That’s what he’s demonstrated over and over,” Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill just a few hours earlier, reported The Hill. “So the idea that he would make a public statement stating that he would want our nuclear arsenal to be fully prepared, it’s a deterrent, and that’s an important show of force for us,” Johnson said.
