Restarting Nuclear Testing: A Truly Stupid Idea

As General Counsel of the Air Force, I had a seat on the Air Force’s Nuclear Enterprise Board. The Air Force is responsible for two of the three legs of the U.S. nuclear forces—land-based missiles and bombers, and the reliability and the safety of the nation’s nuclear enterprise was a critical responsibility. Based on my experience, I can safely say that almost everyone with any knowledge about nuclear weapons would agree that re-starting tests of nuclear weapons would be truly stupid—it would accomplish nothing, would disclose information to our adversaries, and would be viewed as a threatening measure.

While Trump’s Truth Social post making his announcement claims that he is doing do because “of other countries testing programs,” other than North Korea, no Nation has tested nuclear weapons in over thirty years. China and Russia have certainly tested new delivery systems—such as new missiles and cruise missiles—but the U.S. does so as well. The fact remains that China, Russia and the U.S. have not tested nuclear weapons since the 1990s.

Why no testing? We have found other effective ways to test our nuclear arsenal. Indeed, this is a reason why all three countries were comfortable agreeing to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As NPR reported earlier this year, the U.S. uses computer simulations, subcritical experiments and high-powered X-ray machines to test weapon reliability:

The U.S. still needed to ensure that its nuclear weapons were safe and reliable, so nuclear weapons scientists and engineers embarked on a new program to test the nukes without actually setting them off. Kristensen and most experts agree that the program, known as stockpile stewardship, has been effective in staving off new nuclear testing.

“You didn’t need to do nuclear tests to do what you needed to do for the foreseeable future, which is to make sure the nuclear weapons you had worked,” he says.

The stockpile stewardship program broadly consists of two arms — supercomputers at the nation’s major nuclear weapons labs are used to conduct large-scale digital simulations of nuclear weapons from “button to boom.” Highly classified nuclear experiments, like those that take place at PULSE, supply real-world data that ensures that the simulations are accurate.

There are, in fact, advantages to this type of reliability testing instead of nuclear explosions. Most notably, the test results can be kept secret from our adversaries while the results of actual nuclear explosions can be detected by sensors. In addition, nuclear testing is not an easy or inexpensive task—it can take years and lots of money to do a meaningful nuclear test. Even a simple test can cost $100 million. We could probably set off a nuclear weapon at our test facility in Nevada in a matter of months, but the test would be little more than a big boom with no useful data. A truly meaningful test would take years.

So what is the point of announcing a return to nuclear testing? It could be that Trump is responding to Putin’s announcement of two new nuclear delivery systems—the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear-powered underwater drone—and he is merely suggesting we should be the same. . Both of these tests are of delivery systems, not weapons, and the U.S. should certainly test—as we do—our delivery systems.

More likely, Trump just wants to have a meaningless show of force. In that case, look for a nuclear test in the coming months—it will certainly make headlines, but will do little to enhance national security.