Chris Walker reports on “Trump’s Push to Resume Nuclear Weapons Testing Rests on Falsehoods,” November 3, 2025 (https://truthout.org/articles/trumps-push-to-resume-nuclear-weapons-testing-rests-on-falsehoods). Walker is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Here’s some of what he writes.
“This past week, President Donald Trump called on the Department of Defense (DOD) to restart nuclear weapons testing ‘immediately, citing false claims about other countries’ nuclear arsenals and testing.”
“Despite Trump’s suggestion that other countries are testing nuclear weapons, only one country, North Korea, has even tested such weapons in the 21st century. Indeed, most countries ended their nuclear weapons testing in the 1990s. (The U.S. suspended tests in 1992.)”
Walker writes, “Notably, Project 2025 (the policy blueprint for the Trump administration developed by the Heritage Foundation during last year’s presidential election) includes sections that discuss nuclear testing. For example, the document calls on Trump to reject the international Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It also encourages the Trump White House to ‘move to immediate test readiness’ when it comes to the country’s nuclear arsenal.”
Opposition
Walker cites The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
If the U.S. re-starts testing its nuclear weapons, this will accelerate a new nuclear arms race, as other nuclear weapons states do the same.”
“CND calls for more global pressure to create diplomatic space for new treaties to be established, to push for nuclear weapons states to abide by nuclear disarmament obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and for the ratification of the CTBT by all the nuclear weapons states,” the organization continued.
Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on most social media platforms under the handle @thatchriswalker.
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Tom Engelhardt offers criticism of Trump’s decision
(https://counterpunch.org/2025/09/08/a-potentially-world-ending-president). Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear and other books. Here’s some of what he writes
Nuclear war would end the world as we know it
He points out that the world now has “an estimated…an estimated 12,000 or so nuclear weapons of various kinds on this planet — enough, that is, to do in an almost unimaginable number of planets. Worse yet, two of the countries that possess them, India and Pakistan, only recently came close to launching a full-scale war with each other, even exchanging rounds of conventionally armed missiles, before agreeing to a ceasefire. And keep in mind that, if those countries were to use nuclear weaponry against each other in what would still pass for a ‘limited’ nuclear war, it would most likely result not just in almost unimaginable local destruction but planetary devastation. Massive clouds of dust from those nuclear explosions could potentially block the sun, leaving us in what has come to be known as nuclear winter in which more than two billion people on this planet might indeed die.”
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Dan Drolletee Jr, the executive head of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists considers Trump’s proposal to start testing nuclear weapons (https://thebulletin.org/2025/10/the-experts-respond-to-trumps-proposal-to-start-testing-our-nuclear-weapons-on-an-equal-basis/#report-heading).
He points out that “Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media site, that he had instructed the Department of War (formerly the Defense Department) to return to ‘nuclear testing’ — although it’s unclear whether he was referring to testing a nuclear delivery system (such as a rocket) or testing a nuclear explosive device (the actual bomb itself). Those are two very different things that Trump seems to be confused about.”
“In the words of prominent nuclear weapons expert Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists (who is one of the lead authors of the “Nuclear Notebook” column, published regularly in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists):
‘It’s hard to know what he means. As usual, he’s unclear, all over the map, and wrong.’ Kristensen then goes into detail, debunking a series of Trump’s assertions in his social media post.” “For example, even if China was to up the number of its warheads dramatically, that would still amount to less than a third of what the United States and Russia each already have.”
Kristensen also notes, the US already tests its missiles (without nuclear payloads) to ensure that they can launch safely and correctly: “If by testing he [Trump] means nuclear explosive testing, that would be reckless, probably not possible for 18 months, would cost money that Congress would have to approve, and it would certainly trigger Russian and Chinese and likely also India/Pakistan nuclear tests. Unlike the US, all these countries would have much to gain by restarting test testing.”
Drollete cites veteran national security reporter Walter Pincus,
“People today seem to have forgotten—if they ever knew—what a single nuclear weapon can do. The inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, whose home was turned into a nuclear proving ground, have certainly never forgotten.”
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Norman Solomon, the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, the author of War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, and a cofounder of RootsAction.org, writes here on how
“the Dangers of Nuclear War Have Never Been Higher” (https://thenation.com/article/world/nuclear-war-military-spending-doomsday).
He is particularly concerned about Trump’s decision to resume nuclear weapons’ testing. Here’s some of what he writes.
“The dangers of nuclear war have never been higher, but political pressure to prevent it is at low ebb. Eighty years after the atomic age began with the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, words can’t possibly be adequate to describe the extent of global horrors that today’s nuclear arsenals are capable of inflicting. But mainstream US media outlets and partisan politics are routinely oblivious to the threat of oblivion.
“Despite the efforts of individuals and groups striving for arms control, the national discourse ignores the likely results of nuclear buildups—which continue to boost the actual risks of annihilation. Pronouncements from the nuclear establishment about a need to ‘maintain deterrence’ and ‘modernize’ usually go unquestioned as to the underlying assumptions. Senators and representatives praise nuclear systems with components produced in their state or district.”
“More than 700 scientists signed a letter last summer,” Solomon writes, “going beyond the focus on cost to urge the complete elimination of America’s ICBMs. The letter, organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained that ‘the US could eliminate the land-based leg of the triad tomorrow and the US public would only be safer for it.’”
“The history of the last eight decades [since the US dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan]tells us that Americans will go along with astronomical spending for nuclear weaponry if they believe it makes them safer.
“Unless we effectively make the case that the opposite is true, the nuclear arms race will continue to play out in media and politics as a pricey necessity.
In recent years, numerous activists and groups have given priority to calling for abolition of nuclear weapons. It’s a position that occupies the highest moral ground, famously seized by the Nobel laureate scientist George Wald in a widely reprinted 1969 anti-war speech at MIT. ‘Nuclear weapons offer us nothing but a balance of terror, and a balance of terror is still terror,’ he said. ‘We have to get rid of those atomic weapons, here and everywhere. We cannot live with them.’”
There are profits
Solomon writes, “Meanwhile, for the corporate beneficiaries of a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget and an out-of-control nuclear weapons program, the more hostility toward Russia and China the better. And the country that first brought atomic weapons into the world is continuing to lead the way toward thermonuclear destruction.’
Nuclear weapons await launch by accident, if not intention
“For those of us who have lived in the era of nuclear bombs for many decades, still being alive can seem close to miraculous. Luck and collective efforts for sanity must have been factors. Now, the generations with most of their lives potentially ahead are in a world that could instantly make that impossible. The heightened militarism of American politics is threatening to seal their fate.”
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Trump dreamily thinks of protection against foreign enemies. Calls for U.S. Iron Dome are "a Fantasy"
Dr. Laura Grego, takes this position, Common Dreams, Jan 29, 2025
(https://commondreams.org/newswire/calls-for-u-s-iron-dome-a-fantasy). She is a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Shortly after being elected president, “Trump issued an executive order mandating development of a hugely expensive, unrealistic and counterproductive homeland missile defense system. Comparisons to Israel’s Iron Dome are inaccurate and such a system has a low likelihood of success, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).”
Grego continues.
“President Trump’s vision of an Iron Dome over America is a fantasy. The apparent successes of Israel’s Iron Dome system are not relevant to US homeland defense. Iron Dome defends small areas from short-range nonnuclear missiles. It’s a vastly easier task than defending the whole country against missiles that travel 100 times further and seven times faster than those Iron Dome is built for.
“Homeland missile defense requires an entirely different kind of defense, and because ICBMs carry nuclear-armed missiles, it needs to be very reliable and effective. Invoking Iron Dome is just marketing, trying to manufacture credibility for something that has never worked.
“Over the last 60 years, the United States has spent more than $350 billion on efforts to develop a defense against nuclear-armed ICBMs. This effort has been ineffective against a real-world threat. A UCS-MIT technical analysis found that even a less-developed country such as North Korea could use long-understood countermeasures to fool midcourse defenses like the current homeland defense system, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Proposals to get around those weaknesses by building space-based missile defenses have repeatedly been abandoned because they are expensive, very technically challenging, and readily defeated. Trump’s idea of a space-based missile defense is a bad investment.”
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Concluding Thoughts
Trump is again – and again – advocating policies that, if advanced, would be ineffective and harmful to the country. When it comes to nuclear weapons’ policies, the wrong decisions could destroy not only the US but all nations. And given his power, he could well launch these weapons with little or no restraint against any supposed enemy (e.g. China). He has said he is against war, but his rhetoric and decisions contradict that position.
There is opposition to such policies, but it appears too weak to sway the president. He will do what he wants to do, perhaps in a moment of anger, distraction, or mental breakdown.