President Donald Trump’s call for the United States to resume testing of nuclear weapons last week has experts scratching their heads.
What did he really mean – exploding a warhead or testing delivery systems? Does he understand how nuclear weapons work? How will US nuclear adversaries react?
And some experts caution that the testing of nuclear warheads – creating actual nuclear explosions – hurts humans and can have lasting consequences for generations.
Few people know the harm nuclear testing can do better than inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, a country of 1,200 islands and atolls in the Pacific, which was a US-administered trust territory of the United Nations from 1947 to 1986.
As it developed its nuclear arsenal post-World War II, the US exploded 67 nuclear bombs there between 1946 and 1958.
Mushroom-shaped cloud and water column from the underwater Baker nuclear explosion of July 25, 1946. Pictures from History/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Those detonations had the explosive equivalent of one Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb every day for 20 years, according to a 2025 report from the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER).
The radiation effects have been ruinous, according to US government reports cited by the Atomic Heritage Foundation, which said the testing was responsible for 55% of cancers on some of the islands’ northern atolls.
And the effect has been more widespread than in the islands. Scattered by winds in the atmosphere, the nuclear fallout from those tests has resulted in about 100,000 excess cancer deaths worldwide, according to the IEER study. Fallout hotspots were detected as far away as Sri Lanka and Mexico.
Related diseases come from isotopes in the nuclear fallout that can penetrate the human body and cause mutations in DNA, according to a 2024 paper from the American Society of Clinical Oncology Journal.
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