These are our days of unease.
Donald Trump’s declaration that the United States will “immediately” resume nuclear weapons testing adds to that. For this is more than another of his rhetorical flourishes; it is a perilous rupture in the fabric of global nuclear restraint.
For more than thirty years, the United States has adhered to a moratorium on explosive nuclear testing. This has been a self-imposed discipline that has worked. It has helped to contain the most destructive capabilities ever built.
And then, with a few throw-away sentences on social media, Mr Trump has thrown that restraint into question.
His message was characteristically opaque. “Because of other countries’ testing programmes,” he wrote, “I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
“That process will begin immediately,” he wrote.
The revival of the term “Department of War” might have been a flourish for his base, but the rest of the post itself (and this isn’t his only post that does so) revealed an alarming ignorance. It conflated testing nuclear warheads (which would breach the moratorium) with routine missile and delivery-system trials that continue to this day. If it was a bluff, it was a reckless one.
If it was serious, it was destabilising.
To return to live nuclear detonations would take years of preparation, specialised infrastructure and congressional approval. More importantly, it would shatter a global taboo that even hard-line states have observed since the Cold War. Only North Korea has tested nuclear weapons this century. America, Russia and China have relied instead on computer modelling and sub-critical experiments to maintain their arsenals without explosive testing.
The system is imperfect, but it has preserved a measure of stability.
Mr Trump’s impulsive order risks is a debridement of that stability. Should the United States resume explosive testing, Russia and China might well seize upon it as justification to follow suit. China, in particular, stands to gain most from a new testing race. Having conducted far fewer tests than the US or Russia, Beijing would relish the chance to refine its warheads and expand its arsenal, narrowing the technological gap.
We’d not get so much as an arms race as a mushroom cloud race. And no one benefits from that. Indeed, far from restoring American dominance, Mr Trump’s words could accelerate an arms race that erodes it.
The timing could not be worse. The New START treaty, the last remaining limit on American and Russian long-range nuclear weapons, expires next year. Russia has already suspended its participation, and China is expanding its strategic stockpile. A US decision to restart testing could push the world towards an uncontrolled era of nuclear modernisation. If that happened it would be one marked by suspicion, secrecy and spiralling costs. In such an environment, even a small miscommunication could have catastrophic consequences. Just watch Kathryn Bigelow’s ‘A House of Dynamite’ if you have doubts.
The whole episode also exposes a deeper problem: the corrosion of clarity in nuclear policy. Deterrence depends on precision. This means each side understanding where red lines lie. Strategic ambiguity has its place, but confusion from the commander-in-chief is another matter entirely. When allies, adversaries and even the Pentagon cannot really decipher what the president means, deterrence ceases to deter.
It may be that Mr Trump was merely venting after reports of Russian missile tests or Chinese warhead developments. But the dangers in the casual invocation of nuclear testing are legion.
Restarting tests could hand propaganda victories to adversaries, alienate allies committed to non-proliferation, and embolden proliferators who will claim Washington’s precedent as licence for their own programmes.
In the nuclear age, power lies not in provocation but in restraint. For three decades, successive presidents understood that. Mr Trump’s latest outburst shows he may not.
In a world already teetering on the edge of renewed great-power rivalry, that ignorance is not merely embarrassing, it’s nuclear.
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