United States President, Donald Trump, on Thursday, announced that he has directed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing “on a level with China and Russia,” marking a dramatic shift in decades of American policy and escalating global nuclear tensions.
The announcement came just minutes before Trump’s high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Seoul, their first encounter since Trump began his second term.
“Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote on social media, explicitly naming Russia and China.
The president, who has long touted his efforts to modernise America’s nuclear arsenal, boasted that the United States remains the global leader in nuclear strength. “The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country,” he said. “Russia is second, and China is a distant third but will be even within five years.”
Trump added that under his administration, the US had completed “a complete update and renovation of existing weapons.”
The move followed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement on Wednesday that Moscow had successfully tested a nuclear-capable, nuclear-powered underwater drone, the latest in a series of advanced weapons trials that have drawn international alarm.
In televised remarks from a Russian military hospital, Putin described the unmanned torpedo, dubbed Poseidon, as “unstoppable,” claiming it could “travel faster than conventional submarines, dive deep, and reach any continent in the world.”
Putin said there was “no way to intercept” the new system, touting it as a key element of Russia’s evolving nuclear deterrent.
Trump, who last week cancelled a planned summit with Putin in Budapest, criticized the Russian leader’s missile tests earlier in the week, saying he should “end the war in Ukraine instead of testing missiles.”
The president did not specify the nature or timing of the upcoming US tests, but said the process would “begin immediately.”
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) lists nine nuclear-armed states, Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea, collectively possessing an estimated 12,331 warheads. Russia holds roughly 5,580 of them, while the United States maintains 5,044, according to ICAN’s 2024 report.
The US last conducted a full-scale nuclear test in September 1992, detonating a 20-kiloton device underground at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site. The following month, then-President George H.W. Bush imposed a moratorium on further tests, a policy upheld by successive administrations in favor of subcritical experiments and computer simulations.
Trump’s decision, announced on the eve of his summit with Xi, is expected to heighten international concern over a potential new arms race among the world’s major powers.
