Minutes before his meeting with Xi Jinping in Busan, Donald Trump said he had ordered the U.S. Department of the Army to resume nuclear weapons trials “immediately.” The announcement caused a mixture of alarm and confusion among the negotiating teams that had been sent with Chinese representatives to South Korean cities, Beijing, Moscow, and even Washington. The US president has hinted that the world’s first superpower will detonate an atomic bomb again, hours after Vladimir Putin appeared to have successfully demonstrated a nuclear-powered submarine drone capable of destroying an entire city. This test was actually carried out only by North Korea. All of this took place months before the last treaty limiting and restricting the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia expired, definitively ending the era of nuclear control administered during the Cold War.
On October 30th, President Trump published an article on “Truth” (his social network property) referring to his encounter with President Xi Jinping, which was vague and contained many falsehoods. “The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country,” the message began., Even though Russia is posing further. He also lied that China would have as many nuclear leaders as Washington “within five years.” Even as it is clear that the Pentagon is about to launch its first major post-Cold War nuclear weapons modernization program, the staunch Republican who achieved a “complete renewal and refurbishment” of the US atomic bomb in his first term is a project that traces its roots back to the Barack Obama administration and will see $1 billion (equivalent to the GDP of Switzerland) invested over the next 10 years.
Above all, President Trump’s publications in Busan raised many questions about whether the president was referring to resuming nuclear testing. in fact For more than 30 years, it has been the only one to test a strategic nuclear weapons launch system.
In a television interview a few days later, President Trump was less ambiguous when asked what, in the strictest sense, he had ordered to resume nuclear testing. The United States announced it had detonated an atomic bomb for the first time since 1992. “What I’m saying is, we’re going to rehearse like any other country, yes,” he declared to CBS from his Florida golf club, before boasting that with the U.S. arsenal, “we can strike back at the world 150 times.” “Isn’t that logical? You’re building nuclear weapons, but you’re not testing them. How do you know if they work? We have to do it,” the president said, accusing not only North Korea but also Russia, China and Pakistan of conducting secret tests with atomic bombs. “There are no words and there are no journalists to convey it,” he said. President Trump declared, “We are the only country that is not testing.”
China, Moscow and Islamabad rushed to respond to Trump’s accusations and sought to ensure compliance with the informal moratorium that has prohibited nuclear tests since the late 1990s. On the same day, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to lower alarm, saying the “tests ordered by President Trump” did not include “a nuclear explosion.” “The planned tests will cover all components of the weapon and verify that they form the proper configuration to cause an explosion,” Wright declared on Fox News.
Daniel Salisbury, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, believes it is “very unlikely” that Washington would resume detonating underground atomic bombs. “In theory, the United States retains the ability to conduct a nuclear test within 36 months. However, reopening the Nevada National Security Facility (where the last Siglo of 1,000 nuclear tests took place) would be a highly controversial, long and expensive process,” Salisbury argues.
Although it was an incendiary announcement that President Trump had arrived from Busan, the message to China also appeared to be a response to a veiled threat to the United States made by President Putin hours earlier. The Russian president, who was visiting a military hospital in Moscow, said that a test of “another invincible Russian weapon” had just been carried out. The Poseidon torpedo is a nuclear-powered submarine drone designed to travel thousands of kilometers and create a type of radioactive tsunami that can devastate coastal cities. “Its power significantly exceeds the power of our most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles,” declared the Russian dictator surrounded by his successor soldiers in Ukraine. Putin claimed that Poseidon was “unique in the world” and that intercepting it would be an “impossible” mission.
Days before triggering Poseidon’s supposedly satisfactory test, the Russian president told military officials in a video conference that he had completed the “definitive test” of Burevestnik. The test is a nuclear-powered cruise missile that can carry a nuclear warhead and, according to Putin, has “unlimited range.” Both Poseidon and Burevestnik are strategic weapons of mass destruction, designed to strengthen Russia’s deterrent capabilities and to be deployed only in the event of a nuclear attack.
Tests of the Russian military with the latest weapons are carried out frequently. It is not unusual for the Kremlin to make such a fuss about them. In 2018, during a state of the state address, Putin smugly talked about “six invincible weapons” being developed, including the Poseidon torpedo and Burevestnik, emphasizing at the time that the missiles “have unpredictable trajectories and are therefore able to evade US anti-missile defense systems.”
Even more important is the moment chosen by the Russian president to announce the success of the Poseidon and Burevestnik experiments. The American president’s efforts to end the war between the two former Soviet republics appear to have cooled after months of frenzied diplomatic activity in which Trump was confident he could sit down to the same table with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Days before the Russian president praised the capabilities of Poseidon and Burevestnik, the White House canceled a meeting between Putin and Trump scheduled for Budapest, and Washington imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, one of Russia’s oil giants.
Nuclear blackmail as a prison tool
A major invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian forces in February 2022 brought tanks and trenches back to the old continent, and nuclear threats also threatened Kiev’s allies. The majority of analysts agree that, while praising the Kremlin’s nuclear arsenal, it should be interpreted as a means of diplomatic pressure, albeit a threat. This is a way to remind the West, especially Washington, that the risk of nuclear apocalypse increases if Russia feels trapped and unable to achieve its objectives in Ukraine.
The Kremlin reacted quickly to President Trump’s bravado in South Korea. “If the President of the United States somehow mentioned Poseidon and Burevestnik, then these (essays) cannot be considered nuclear tests without any concept,” presidential spokesperson Dmitri Peskov clarified to TASS news agency. After Trump said in an interview with CBS that Russia was secretly conducting an atomic bomb test, Putin flatly denied the accusation but warned that the Eurasian country would test a weapon of mass destruction again if Washington took the first step.
The increased use of nuclear rhetoric comes less than four months before the expiration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last bilateral agreement in force imposing limits on Russia and the United States’ nuclear arsenals. Other pillars of this arms control structure – such as the Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Weapons signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, and the Treaty on Anti-Ballistic Missiles agreed between Richard Nixon and Leonid Breznev in 1972 – have continued to crumble over the years.
negotiate with china
Ahead of the impending end to more than 50 years of security programs between the United States and Russia, President Trump is insisting that future arms control agreements must include China. Beijing insists that no one is interested in these conversations and that its nuclear arsenal is very small compared to the United States. The Xi administration suspended all communications with Washington on arms control in July 2024, following the sale of several North American anti-aircraft defense systems to Taiwan.
Arsenals in Moscow and Washington contain about 90% of the 12,240 atomic bombs that the Federation of American Scientists estimates exists in the world. The other seven nuclear powers (China, France, Britain, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea) have just over 1,000 nuclear weapons. The Pentagon counts the number of nuclear chiefs available to China at 600, and estimates that number will rise to more than 1,000 by 2030.
A phase of uncertainty will begin when New START, signed in Prague by President Obama and Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, expires in February. Georgia Cole, a researcher at Chatham House, a UK analysis center, sums it up: “The absence of agreed limits increases mistrust and increases the risk of misunderstandings and miscalculations.” “Unfortunately, given the current geopolitical tensions, it is highly unlikely that a new nuclear control treaty will be signed soon,” the expert predicts.
Paradoxically, it is precisely Medvedev, the current deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, who has resorted most to nuclear threats since the invasion of Ukraine began. Last September, the former Russian president warned European leaders that if they made the “mistake of provoking a conflict” with Russia, it would escalate into a “war with weapons of mass destruction.” President Dmitry Medvedev announced that the end of the era of nuclear control marks the beginning of “a new reality with which we will have to deal” with Russia’s enemies.
The possibility of sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine so that Kiev could hit targets in Moscow and St. Petersburg was discussed in Washington several weeks ago, but Medvedev directly threatened the US president, saying, “The deployment of these missiles could end very badly for everyone, and above all for Trump himself.”
The risks of developing new nuclear weapons are not limited to the arsenals of Russia, the United States, and China. “The relationship between India and Pakistan remains very tense and unstable, and North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons,” Cole said. Chatham House researchers note that although “the United States and Israel have ensured that their bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities[in June]was highly effective,” the Islamic Republic “appears to still retain some of its capabilities.”
As such, it lacked fodder for the controversy in Washington over nuclear weapons that erupted a few weeks ago. A house full of dynamite, A drama directed by Kathryn Bigelow about an impending nuclear attack on the United States. Internal documents from the Missile Defense Agency have been released as evidence of the discomfort that has arisen within the Pentagon. bloomberg, It claims the catastrophic scenario created in the film is “inaccurate” and criticizes the fictional depiction “underestimating the power of the United States’ defense system.” Noah Oppenheim, screenwriter A house full of dynamite, He clarified to CNN that his intention was precisely to “spark a debate about an important issue that doesn’t get enough attention: the large number of nuclear weapons in the world and the immense danger they pose to humanity.”
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