President Donald Trump’s order for the Pentagon to resume nuclear testing has scientists fearing the world is closer than ever to a global catastrophe.
Months before Trump’s decision on Wednsday, experts gave a stark warning that if this day came, saying that the US may end up triggering a ‘global chain reaction’ which leads to World War III.
Geologist Sulgiye Park of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy group, said: ‘It’s like striking a match in a roomful of dynamite.’
Nuclear weapons tests mean blowing up atomic bombs, usually underground, to check if they’re still working right.
The US has not engaged in testing nuclear weapons since 1992, when then-President George Bush imposed a moratorium on the testing that was later extended through the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which 187 nations have signed.
Scientists have warned that restarting this program after more than three decades could lead to more nations abandoning the treaty and conducting their own nuclear experiments in retaliation.
Park predicted that this could make non-nuclear nations panic and build their own bombs, tearing up arms control deals.
Moreover, underground blasts can crack the earth and let radiation escape, with one former nuclear safety official saying inexperienced countries could mess up their tests and spread harmful fallout across populated areas.
President Donald Trump made the nuclear testing announcement on Truth Social just hours before his scheduled meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping
A recent report estimated that there are still over 12,000 nuclear warheads in the world, controlled by nine different countries
Trump told the Department of War on Wednesday to begin testing nukes ‘immediately’ and explained the military flex was necessary to combat Russia and China from closing the gap in the arms race.
Jill Hruby, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration during the Biden Administration, called a new US nuclear test ‘a very bad idea.’
‘What we’ve been saying consistently now for decades is there’s no scientific reason that we need to test,’ Hruby told ScienceNews.
The former Biden official added that US nuclear scientists have the benefit of experience when it comes to knowing everything there is to know about safely detonating a nuclear bomb.
However, she warned, ‘other countries might not be as knowledgeable,’ and this will only add to the risk of a radioactive leak if more nations follow America’s lead in restarting weapons testing.
The US conducted over 1,000 of these in Nevada alone from the 1940s to 1992, and other nations like Russia carried out roughly 1,000 more worldwide during that time.
However, the US never ratified the CTBT in the 1990s, meaning America agreed to no longer test nuclear weapons, but Congress voted no on signing it into law, citing concerns that other nations may break the agreement in the future.
Now, a separate deal between the US and Russia to limit how many large nuclear missiles and bombs each side can have, called New START, is set to expire in 2026.
Nuclear warheads can be launched from positions on land, by bombers in the air, and submarines at sea (Stock Image)
A worker prepares the B61-13, a nuclear ‘gravity bomb’ 24 times more powerful than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945
The US has already accused both Russia and China of expanding and updating their nuclear facilities, adding that Russia has been violating agreements that prohibit weapons experiments that create a nuclear chain reaction.
‘Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,’ Trump declared. ‘That process will begin immediately.’
Both the US and Russia have warned of the possibility of a nuclear war breaking out amid the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
With the end of the New START treaty in sight, the White House had already been positioning the US for a return to nuclear experimentation.
Even before Trump took office, officials revealed that a secret US nuclear weapons facility near Las Vegas was gearing up to restart underground weapons tests.
Known as the Principal Underground Laboratory for Subcritical Experimentation (PULSE), Hruby revealed in January that the site was scheduled to go back into use later in 2025.
Since then, the US military accelerated the timeline for the new B61-13, a nuclear ‘gravity bomb,’ which wasn’t slated to go into production for the Air Force until 2026.
The new weapon, which is 24 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, went into production in April.
A month later, the Trump Administration fast-tracked the reopening of a Utah mine that will ramp up production of the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The US Department of the Interior announced it sped up the environmental review of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine to just 14 days.
The owners of Velvet-Wood, Anfield Energy, believe that there is 4.6 million pounds of uranium oxide and 47.1 million pounds of vanadium capable of being produced, based on a preliminary economic assessment.
In terms of what this could mean for the US military, that much uranium could power the reactors of approximately 85 nuclear submarines and produce over 1,000 nuclear bombs.
