Nuclear tests, as well as the number of atomic warheads that each country has, are much more symbolic than practical. At present, and even if fifty percent of the missiles fail due to inactivity, both Russia, the United States and probably China have enough capacity to end the world as we know it. The same could be said, to a lesser extent, of France and the United Kingdom, the large European nuclear umbrellas.
In that propaganda sense we must understand the announcement of Donald Trump that it is going to recover nuclear tests on American soil, although anything that is published on a social network and not in an official document should always be taken with a grain of salt. “Because other countries are testing their nuclear programs, I have given orders to the Department of Defense to begin testing our nuclear weapons in the same way,” said the American president in Truth Social.
The announcement comes just days after Russia tested the new nuclear-capable Burevestnik cruise missile, and just hours after its own Vladimir Putin announced that the tests of the autonomous torpedo of the submarine Poseidon “had been a success.” The Poseidon is the jewel in the atomic crown of the Russian Federation, a submarine that is initially undetectable and capable of launching several torpedoes thousands of kilometers away.
Nothing in here is correct. Russia’s stockpile is larger than ours, by a small margin. Trump did not create a larger stockpile by “updating” in his first term. No nation except North Korea has tested nuclear weapons since the 1990s. pic.twitter.com/siLp8ihXCY
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 30, 2025
The new climb
These tests, although carried out with conventional weapons, consolidate with facts the Kremlin’s bravado of recent years. According to information documented in several books, the administration Joe Biden She was convinced that Russia would make the nuclear leap in the fall of 2022 with the use of some type of weapon on Ukrainian soil. This conviction marked subsequent US policy regarding the limits it imposed on Ukraine in the use of the weapons sent. Nobody wanted to put Putin in a corner and make him nervous.
Given the success, the threats have continued. Not only from public television, where they are constant, but through the former president Dmitri Medvédevwho already had a public discussion with Trump because of his ability to talk about nuclear attacks left and right, but also about other senior members of the Russian Government. The last one to join has been Viatcheslav Volodinpresident of the Duma, who assured on Wednesday that “The West must prepare to come to Putin with its cap in hand so that Russia does not use one of the Poseidon torpedoes.”
Trump has probably grown tired of so much really unnecessary cockiness. It must be insisted that a Poseidon torpedo is not needed to cause a nuclear massacre. Both Russian, American and Chinese leaders still grew up in the times of the Cold War and understand better than anyone what mutually assured destruction is all about. Sending a single nuclear missile of any type would provoke in a few hours a series of attacks and reprisals that no one would want to survive.
From CTBT to Project 2025
Trump’s announcement also came hours before his meeting with Xi Jinping in South Korea. In principle, this meeting had a commercial purpose: to study the situation of Chinese-owned companies such as TikTok or Huawei, seek agreements to exploit and import “rare earths” and pressure China to stop buying so much oil from Russia, which in practice makes it the major financier of the war in Ukraine.
Xi is not one to let himself be pressured easily and Trump knows that, but there is probably a relationship between the announcement in Truth Social and the meeting. A relationship that has less to do with China itself than with the desire to flex its muscles against its greatest ally. A way of saying to the Asian giant: “You are better off with us than with them because we are stronger,” something that, it cannot be insisted too many times, is irrelevant in nuclear terms.
If the tests are confirmed, they would be the first US nuclear weapons tests since 1992, even with George H. W. Bush in the White House, when an underground test was conducted in Nevada that is often marked as the definitive end of the cold war. Currently, the United States has 5,225 nuclear warheads compared to Russia’s 5,580 and China’s approximately 600. None of the three countries has officially recognized a nuclear weapons test since 1996, the year in which France also carried out its last test, on the Moruroa atoll.
The signing that same year – without official ratification by any of the three great powers – of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has allowed three decades of some relaxation in this regard. It does not seem a coincidence that the so-called Project 2025, from which Trump first distanced himself to embrace it as soon as he arrived at the White House, included the return of nuclear tests as one of the keys to American foreign policy.