The last nuclear weapons test in the United States was carried out in 1992, however, the measure adopted by Trump represents a radical change in US nuclear policy that will have potentially negative effects on the environment and the health of the population worldwide.
Mexico City, November 3 (However).- Donald Trump wants to resume nuclear tests after a pause of more than 30 years that began in 1992. The announcement has generated alerts because this decision could generate an arms race, now more accelerated than in the past, with more disastrous results for the environment and even people’s health, as scientific evidence indicates.
This Wednesday, October 28, minutes before meeting with the President of China, Xi Jinping, Trump announced that he had instructed the War Department to immediately begin testing the nuclear weapons available to the American Union, for the first time in 33 years and despite having signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
“Due to the testing programs of other countries, I have instructed the War Department to begin testing our nuclear weapons on equal terms. This process will begin immediately,” the Republican wrote on his Truth Social account, where he assured that the United States has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world, thanks to the actions he took in his first term.
“The United States possesses more nuclear weapons than any other country. This was achieved, including a complete modernization and renewal of the existing arsenal, during my first term. Because of their tremendous destructive power, it was very difficult for me to do it, but I had no choice! Russia is in second place, and China is a distant third, but the situation will equalize in five years,” he said.
Although the United States did not ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which has the greatest support worldwide to encourage disarmament, it is obliged to comply with it. In addition, it signed with Russia the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which expires next February 2026, and each country cannot exceed 1,550 warheads on deployed missiles, which are capable of crossing continents.
Although the total nuclear arsenal of each country is officially unknown, according to approximate figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in its 2024 yearbookbetween the United States and Russia they possess “nearly 90 percent of all nuclear warheads.” While China until January 2024 had 500 warheads, of which 24 were deployed and 476 stored.
For its part, until that year it had a total inventory of 5,044 warheads, of which 1,770 were deployed; 1,938 were stored; and had removed 1,336 nuclear warheads. Meanwhile, Russia had a total inventory of 5,580 nuclear warheads, of which 1,710 were deployed; 2,670 were stored; and they had removed 1,200 nuclear warheads.
The SIPRI 2025 yearbook highlighted that until 2018, the United States Government made public “the number of warheads dismantled” per year, however, the administration led by Trump “put an end to this practice”, which returned with the Government of President Joe Biden, although according to this data, between 2021 and 2024, the dismantling of warheads had been reduced.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the US arsenal is stored in “submarines and missile silos 24 meters deep in five states of the Great Plains”, the same is in air bases and 100 bombs were deployed in air bases in five countries in Europe.
“The destructive power of American weapons is very diverse. The most powerful weapon, the B83 gravity bomb, is more than 80 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The smallest weapon has an explosive power of only 2 percent of that. These ‘low-power’ weapons are specifically designed to be easier to use, which increases the likelihood that they will be used,” the UCS highlighted.
Although initially nuclear tests had the objective of knowing the effects of nuclear weapons; For example, explosion damage at different distances, which provided confidence in the destruction of a given military target, after the end of World War II, states have primarily used testing as part of the development of new weapons designs.
This same development motivated more than two thousand nuclear tests, which led to enormous environmental and health problems for the population, which in turn led to movements to stop these tests, which achieved small progress. The first, in 1963, with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in all environments except underground.
In the 1990s, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty took place, signed by 187 countries, including the United States, largely driven by technology, as it allowed for more reliable nuclear weapons that did not require detonation, so the most advanced countries stopped doing so, with the exception of France, which conducted atmospheric tests in 1996.
China also carried out its last nuclear test in 1996, making North Korea the only state that has openly carried out a nuclear test in this century, the most recent in 2017. However, after the instruction given by President Trump to reactivate these tests, global concern is growing due to the serious risks that radioactive fallout would generate worldwide.
Even if such nuclear tests are carried out underground, this poses a risk in terms of the possible release and emission of radioactive materials, as well as the potential filtration into groundwater, as noted by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which referred to how the effects of “strontium-90 on nursing mothers and their babies” motivated the signing of the treaty in 1963.
In this sense, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty recognizes the “disproportionate impact” of the ionizing radiation emitted by nuclear weapons, and an example of these consequences are the nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, which in their wake left “alarming rates of stillbirths, spontaneous abortions, congenital defects and reproductive problems in their communities,” highlighted ICAN.
During the discussion of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Kokatha victims in Australia, where the United Kingdom detonated nuclear bombs in the 1950s, and in the Marshall Islands, particularly in Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, where the United States was responsible for nuclear tests, publicly denounced, on the one hand, the contempt for Aboriginal communities and, on the other, the negative effects of these tests on their health.
The indigenous groups recalled that no one warned them about the explosions that took place there and that they were treated like “guinea pigs,” since they considered them “expendable” and their sacred lands “as worthless, so they were not even asked for any consent to carry out the tests, nor were they given any protection during and after them.
The victims emphasized that they subjected “our people to epidemics of cancer, chronic diseases and congenital malformations.” Furthermore, they added, in many cases they have “been denied access to adequate medical care and even to our own medical records.”
It was on September 23, 1992, when the United States Government carried out its last nuclear test of the last century. Called “Divider,” the test was carried out in an underground complex north of Las Vegas, Nevada, the site where new nuclear tests could restart, which could spark an arms race by the adversaries of the American Union, said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA).
“Trump is misinformed and out of touch with reality. The United States has no technical, military or political reason to resume explosive nuclear testing for the first time since 1992. It would take at least 36 months to resume controlled underground nuclear testing at the former Nevada test site,” he said.
“By recklessly announcing his intention to resume nuclear testing, Trump will provoke strong public opposition in Nevada, from all US allies, and could trigger a chain reaction of nuclear testing by US adversaries and blow up the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” he added.
Trump is misinformed and out of touch. The U.S. has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing for the first time since 1992. It would take least 36 months to resume contained nuclear tests underground at the former test site in Nevada. 1/ pic.twitter.com/wdTRf9EwVo
— Daryl G Kimball (@DarylGKimball) October 30, 2025
Almost all of the hard-won treaties limiting nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War have been repealed. Currently only one treaty remains that limits 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons, which are in the hands of the United States and Russia. This is the New START Treaty, which will expire in February of next year.
Although Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, offered to informally extend that treaty for another year, and Trump has said that is a good idea, the official end is only four months away, and negotiations for a successor treaty have not yet begun, in which the Republican said China should participate, a country that has not expressed its willingness to be part of the process.
– With information from The Conversation