- President Trump posted an eyebrow-raising statement on Wednesday night on US nuclear testing.
- The US hasn't tested a nuclear weapon in decades, just the delivery vehicles.
- Much of Trump's post doesn't align with what's publicly known about nuclear weapons and stockpiles.
President Donald Trump's social media post on nuclear weapons testing is confusing and doesn't make sense with what is publicly known about nukes.
The post's first sentence is off, and the rest of it raises more questions than it answers. Nuclear experts say they are not entirely sure what is on the table.
Here's what the president's post said:
Mackenzie Knight-Boyle, a senior research associate for the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, called the post "inflammatory," noting it comes at a tense time and risks pouring fuel on a new global nuclear arms race. And that heightened risk appears to be based on some inaccurate information.
The opening line of the Truth Social post says the US "has more nuclear weapons than any other country."
Per FAS' estimated nuclear warhead inventory numbers for this year, the US stockpile stands at around 3,700, second to Russia, which houses 4,309. China is thought to have around 600 operational warheads. The president's assessment that China possesses the third-largest arsenal is accurate.
Where it took a turn is the suggestion that Beijing will achieve parity with Russia or the US within five years. The Pentagon's latest public assessment indicates China will have roughly 1,000 nuclear warheads operational by 2030.
The US Department of Energy has noted the current stockpile of US nuclear weapons is the lowest it's been since the 1960s, when the number peaked at 31,255 warheads. Most of the US' current weapons were produced in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Trump's post, he indicated that the building of what he described as the world's largest arsenal "was accomplished" during his first term. He said that this included a "complete update and renovation of existing weapons."
Knight-Boyle told Business Insider it's difficult to determine what Trump's talking about. "I would assume that he's referring to the nuclear modernization program," she said. The nuclear modernization program, which includes work on the Columbia-class submarine, Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile, and B-21 Raider, was started during the Obama administration and is still incomplete.
Both the Columbia and Sentinel programs are over budget and years behind schedule. For instance, since the Sentinel contract was awarded, the Pentagon has raised cost projections by $140 billion and pushed ICBM deployment into the 2030s. Columbia, likewise, is expected well past its intended delivery date. The Navy is considering extending the life of its aging Ohio-class fleet to compensate, while the Air Force is working to keep its Minuteman III missiles operational longer than originally planned.
The main message of Trump's Truth Social statement was that he has "instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis." Again, Knight-Boyle said that it is unclear what the president means.
"If he's referring to explosive nuclear testing, that would not be done by the Department of War/Department of Defense," she said. The National Nuclear Security Administration within the Department of Energy would oversee that process, as it did up until the US made the testing in 1992.
Rather than proposing a return to the kind of nuclear weapons testing that the US military did between 1945 and 1992 at places like the Nevada Test Site or the Pacific, testing that had catastrophic environmental and radiological consequences, Trump may be calling for testing of delivery systems, which the US already does. Minuteman III ICBM tests are routine.
Daryl Kimball, the director of the Arms Control Association, said in a social media statement that "Trump's post is not clear about whether he is talking about n-explosive testing (which the NNSA would do) or flight testing of n-capable missiles (which the DoD does)."
The Pentagon did not respond to Business Insider's request for clarity, and the White House pointed to Trump's post.
There were reports of discussions during Trump's first term in office about restarting nuclear tests for the first time since the 1990s. And last year, Trump's former national security advisor wrote an essay with ideas for a second Trump presidency that called for maintaining America's nuclear superiority over rivals by testing "new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992."
Knight-Boyle said the process of restarting these kinds of tests would take months or even years and would require appropriations from Congress.
Trump said in his post that the decision on nuclear testing is due to "other countries testing programs." North Korea is thought to be the only country that has conducted a full nuclear test this century, but definitions of what constitutes a nuclear test vary.
The US has previously accused Russia of violating the "zero-yield" standard and suggested it's possible China had as well. Work has been spotted at the Lob Nur and Novaya Zemlya nuclear testing sites. There wasn't clarity on what Trump meant when he said the US would start testing on an "equal basis."
A push to restart testing in the US could prompt other nuclear powers to do the same in a big way, which could be to America's disadvantage, as experts have noted. The US has conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests, more than Russia and China combined, and it has also collected a lot amount of data from computer modeling.
Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons and arms control expert who was among many other experts confused by Trump's post, argued previously that "the technical superiority of the American nuclear stockpile exists only because Russia and China quit testing and the United States invested heavily in science."
"If a second Trump administration resumed nuclear testing," he asserted in a Foreign Affairs essay last year, "Russia and China would surely follow suit — and because they have more to learn from each test, they would erode the United States' advantage."
In newer commentary, Heather Williams, the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies Project on Nuclear Issues, wrote that "China would stand to gain the most in terms of weapons design and warhead information, further contributing to its nuclear buildup."
Trump's statement comes at a tense time after Russia conducted a test of its new nuclear-capable Burevestnik cruise missile and nuclear-powered torpedo Poseidon earlier this week. But the Burevestnik test, a Kremlin spokesperson said, was "not a nuclear test in any way. All countries are developing their defense systems, but this is not a nuclear test."
Trump's post also came just before his meeting in South Korea with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While South Korea has agreed not to develop nuclear weapons, debates in Seoul about whether the country should pursue a nuclear weapons program amid North Korea's activities have heated up in recent years.
"The environment is really tense right now," Knight-Boyle told Business Insider. "President Trump's post exacerbates those tensions, and we should be concerned about how Russia and China are going to interpret and react to this statement."
