Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that the Trump administration is not planning on conducting nuclear explosions at this time, after the president ordered nuclear weapons testing last week. “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests,” Wright told Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing.” “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions. So you’re testing all the other parts of a nuclear weapon.”
Last week, President Donald Trump said that he’d ordered the Pentagon to resume nuclear testing “immediately” and “on an equal basis” with Russia and China. The move signaled a reversal of decades of U.S. nuclear policy that could have far-reaching consequences for relations with U.S. adversaries.
While Trump said he’d directed the Defense Department to resume nuclear tests, it is the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration that designs and manages the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The NNSA operates the Nevada Test Site, a reservation about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, where the United States last conducted a nuclear test explosion deep under Rainier Mesa in September 1992. After that, President George H.W. Bush implemented a moratorium on such exercises at the conclusion of the Cold War.
Trump’s announcement prompted confusion and alarm from experts who argued that physical testing is outdated and would add momentum to an arms race it aims to counter. The news came after Russia said it had successfully tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, and a large torpedo, the Poseidon, which are nuclear-capable weapons systems. Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, has abstained from carrying out a nuclear detonation.
Trump did not include many details in his announcement, which he made on a Truth Social post. Trump wrote that the process would begin immediately and was in response to other countries’ testing programs.
During a “60 Minutes” interview recorded on Friday, before Wright’s comments to Fox News, Trump doubled down on the contention that the U.S. needs to test nuclear weapons.
After CBS’s Norah O’Donnell pointed out that Russia had tested systems but not warheads, Trump replied, “Of course they have.”
He later added: “If we have them, we have to test them, otherwise you don’t really know how they’re gonna work.”
Trump’s move relies on an argument popular within the administration that testing is necessary to combat a rising proliferation threat from places such as Russia, China and North Korea, all of which have modernized their systems in recent years.
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