TEHRAN – Darryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association (ACA), said a U.S. nuclear test would likely “collapse the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).”
On October 30, President Trump ordered the Department of Defense to immediately resume the nuclear weapons testing process, which had been suspended for 33 years. “As other countries conduct nuclear testing programs, I have directed the Department of the Army to begin testing nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately,” President Trump wrote on Truth Social while flying a Marine One helicopter to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping for trade negotiations in Busan, South Korea.
“If President Trump is serious about pushing for a resumption of U.S. nuclear bomb testing, it will continue to provoke strong international opposition and likely cause a dangerous chain reaction of nuclear tests by Russia, North Korea, India, and perhaps other countries, leading to the collapse of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons,” Kimball told the Tehran Times.
Kimball says the world is safer thanks to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and norms against nuclear testing. He said it was “important” that all governments calmly and directly call on the United States and all other nuclear-weapon states to respect the global moratorium on nuclear testing, and that those in countries that have not ratified the CTBT, including the United States, China and Russia, are calling on their governments to do so in order to bring the treaty into “full legal effect.”
The text of the interview is below.
President Trump ordered the War Department to begin nuclear weapons testing. What impact will this order have, especially as you warned it would be a “mistake of historic proportions for international security”?
If President Trump is serious about pushing for a resumption of U.S. nuclear bomb testing, it would continue to provoke strong international opposition, possibly setting off a dangerous chain reaction of nuclear tests by Russia, North Korea, India, and perhaps other countries, and disrupting the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. But opposition to the White House’s move to resume nuclear testing is growing in Congress, Nevada and among U.S. allies.
“There are Russian tests, there are Chinese tests, and we’re not talking about that,” Trump said, adding that nuclear tests would be conducted on “comparable standards.” Please explain these unfair charges.
No other country other than North Korea has conducted an explosive nuclear test since the beginning of this century, and the last one was in 2017. I believe that President Trump is confused or misinformed about the efforts of other countries to build up their weapons stockpiles (China), flight tests of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads (Russia and China), and the potential development of long-range missiles by other countries (Pakistan), and mistakenly refers to these as “nuclear tests.”
Many nuclear scientists and nonproliferation experts say the United States has little to gain from on-the-job training. what is your opinion?
“The United States has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear testing.”
Since the United States last conducted a nuclear test in 1992, the United States has had no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing. This was the year that a bipartisan majority in the US Congress mandated a moratorium on nuclear testing. Under public pressure, President Clinton extended the moratorium on U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 and helped begin negotiations on a worldwide ban on nuclear explosive tests. In 1996, Clinton became the first leader to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty, which established global norms against nuclear testing. A total of 187 countries have signed the Convention.
The United States has conducted 1,030 nuclear test explosions since 1945, accounting for the majority of the 2,056 nuclear test explosions worldwide. Most of these nuclear explosions were intended to prove that new designs of nuclear warheads worked as expected. Currently, the United States already has several types of nuclear warheads that are well proven, and there are no new “requirements” for new designs that require nuclear test detonations.
“We’ve collected more data than anyone else,” Brandon Williams, the current head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said during his confirmation hearing earlier this year. “And that very data has underpinned our scientific basis for determining the stockpile. I’m not … recommending testing.”
In Williams’ response to written questions from Congress, he said, “The United States continues to abide by the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing, and since 1992 has assessed that its deployed nuclear stockpile remains safe, secure, and effective even without explosive nuclear testing.”
“These are not nuclear explosions,” Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright said, calling them “non-significant explosions.” What are your comments?
The U.S. Energy Secretary said on November 2 that President Trump must have been referring to non-explosive “subcritical nuclear tests” aimed at helping U.S. weapons scientists understand how the plutonium in U.S. nuclear warheads behaves over time. However, the White House has not yet confirmed that this is what President Trump intended.