In the U.S., Defense News interviewed a number of nuclear weapons experts, warning that the full resumption of nuclear testing would backfire on the U.S. It would be unnecessary, costly, undermine nonproliferation efforts, and empower the nation’s adversaries to use their own tests as intimidation. John Erath, the senior policy director for the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said President George H.W. Bush joined the testing moratorium in 1992 mainly because the U.S. was way ahead of the rest of the world.
“The U.S. had conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests,” Erath told Defense News. “We had all the data necessary to know how nuclear weapons work, to verify that U.S. nuclear weapons would work, and other people didn’t. So by stopping testing when we did, we sort of locked in an advantage in knowledge that persists to this day.”
Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, pointed to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California as an example of the kind of state-of-the-art facilities that the U.S. had developed for safe nuclear testing purposes. According to its website, the National Ignition Facility uses the largest and highest-energy laser system in the world to create controlled thermonuclear reactions and study them to ensure the U.S. nuclear stockpile will function as intended.
The NIF’s simulation capabilities obviate the need for any testing of existing, upgraded, or new weapons, Kristensen said. “It’s just a fundamentally different situation for the United States,” he said.
The U.S. is now modernizing its nuclear forces by creating a new gravity bomb, the B61-13, and new warheads to go on the upcoming LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile and the Trident II D5 missile. Part of that work will involve tests of the warheads’ critical subsystems, Erath said. He said, though, that it is not necessary to go through the entire process and trigger the nuclear reactions that create devastating blasts to know whether the weapon will work.
