Rusting nuclear facilities hamper Trump’s plans for new tests

The United States is not ready to restart nuclear weapons testing and risks losing ground to China and Russia if it pushes ahead with Donald Trump’s plans, experts believe.

The president announced this week that the US would conduct tests of nuclear weapons for the first time in more than three decades, breaking one of the few remaining taboos among the superpowers.

Experts fear that in doing so, Mr Trump has fired the starting gun on a race Washington is ill-prepared to win, and that it could find itself matched or overtaken by Moscow and Beijing.

Visitors to America’s vast testing site in the Nevada desert said it is filled with equipment that is slowly rusting away, while former officials say it simply has not had the investment to match the president’s ambitions.

Now there are fears that Mr Trump has opened a “Pandora’s Box” that has remained shut almost since the end of the Cold War. And he might not be prepared for what comes next.

The president made the announcement on Thursday via his Truth Social platform, shortly before sitting down for talks with Xi Jinping.

Some believe it was a case of nuclear sabre-rattling intended to intimidate the Chinese premier. Some think he was kicking off a nuclear arms race in earnest. And others are simply baffled by the announcement.

Credit: Reuters

Since 1992, the US, China and Russia abide by a moratorium on nuclear testing, although one US official suggested several years ago that Moscow could be conducting secret experiments.

Because none of the superpowers have ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CBTB), which bans “any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion”, this is not legally binding.

The situation resembles a Mexican stand-off, but with nuclear bombs instead of guns.

Mr Trump’s announcement could have been prompted by Moscow’s claims to have tested nuclear-powered weapons, such as its “Poseidon” drone apparently capable of creating a radioactive tsunami, or “Skyfall” cruise missiles, said to have an effectively unlimited range.

But this is different to detonating a nuclear warhead.

Mr Trump giving the instruction to the Pentagon also rings alarm bells: the energy department has responsibility for atomic testing through the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

“The president of the United States needs to be speaking with clarity and precision and care about nuclear matters. And as we can see, this president is not,” said Daryl G Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association.

“If there’s a nuclear crisis, and if Trump is communicating this way, it could lead to catastrophe.”

Corey Hinderstein, a former senior NNSA official, wants the president to urgently clarify his announcement on Thursday.

“It’s one thing to fire the starting gun,” she said. “It’s another thing to accidentally pull the trigger.”

Mr Trump’s announcement seemingly dropped out of the sky with all the force of a 50-megaton bomb, but the idea has been floated for a while.

Officials in the president’s first term reportedly considered breaking the moratorium, and Robert O’Brien, Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, publicly backed that move last year as a means of “peace through strength”.

Yet others believe the US has maintained its lead among global nuclear arsenals precisely because of the tests it conducted before the practice became taboo in the 1990s.

Credit: Kremlin.ru / Russian Defence Ministry

Since 1945, Washington has detonated 1,149 nuclear devices compared to Russia’s 969. China, a fledgling superpower during the same period, detonated a mere 45.

Ms Hinderstein, who now works with the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace in Washington, DC, says the US has a much more sophisticated understanding of nuclear weapons because of those tests and there is no technical need for full-scale trials to ensure the reliability and safety of its existing weapons stockpile.

The information it already has from earlier trials can be used in tandem with billion-dollar supercomputers at sites which simulate nuclear tests without the need for detonations. One such site is Los Alamos in New Mexico where Robert Oppenheimer led efforts to build a nuclear bomb during the Second World War.

Ms Hinderstein said: “The United States is better-suited to do all of this without nuclear testing than any of our adversaries. Starting a testing cascade where others would follow is actually giving a cheat code to our adversaries that they don’t have.”

Authorities could detonate a nuclear device underground within about 18 months if they did not have to collect any data: what one expert refers to as a “screw you nuclear test explosion”.

Mounting a proper test would take, by broad consensus, at least three years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Miners and drillers qualified to work in a nuclear test zone would have to be hired. Equipment such as a specialised crane to lower the device deep into the ground needs to be procured. Sand and rock must be stockpiled to fill the shafts and prevent radioactive material from spreading above ground.

Staffing issues at the NNSA exacerbated by Elon Musk’s Doge cuts will scarcely speed up the process, which could be further delayed if Nevada politicians mount a legal fight to stop tests going ahead.

And, on top of all of that, the test site simply is not fit for Mr Trump’s purposes.

“The area where they’re storing the equipment for the test readiness programme is filled with rusted cables and equipment,” recalled Mr Kimball, who visited the site two years ago.

Others told The Washington Post the equipment that would be used to excavate the site for an underground nuclear detonation was a “rust pit”.

“It doesn’t look fancy and shiny,” said a former official. “The equipment would be capable, but it certainly wouldn’t impress anybody with its modern characteristics.”

At the same time, satellite images appear to show that Russia and China have been upgrading their test sites at Novaya Zemlya and Lop Nur so they are ready to resume nuclear detonations.

Mr Kimball expects they would probably be able to do so more rapidly than the US “because they have fewer safety and regulatory issues to deal with”.

There is widespread bafflement about why Mr Trump should be the president to break a taboo observed by his predecessors since the days of George Bush Snr.

It’s only a few months ago that he said he wanted to “denuclearise” and reduce the US stockpile of 3,800 nuclear weapons.

Some speculate that an official connected to the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that has called for the resumption of nuclear weapons tests, raised the issue with him.

Robert Peters, a research fellow with the foundation, told The Washington Post last week the US needed to “do something to demonstrate that we’re not going to be intimidated or coerced by these autocrats in Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang”.

A years-long wait for tests was “unacceptable”, he said, suggesting the president could carry out a test above ground, which has not been done since the days of John F Kennedy and has been linked to increased cancer rates.

Other experts hope the president misspoke or is indulging in characteristic brinkmanship, and that the Kremlinologists in China and Russia aren’t taking him too literally.

Almost nobody knows what Mr Trump means. He may not be sure himself. Either way, a nuclear arms race might already have begun.

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