U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he has instructed the United States Department of Defense to resume nuclear-weapons testing “on a level with China and Russia,” signalling a major shift in decades of American nuclear policy.
The statement, released just minutes before Trump’s high-stakes meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Seoul, marks the first encounter between the two 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, specifically naming Russia and China.
Trump said the United States remains the global leader in nuclear strength. “The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country,” he declared. “Russia is second, and China is a distant third but will be even within five years.”
Under his administration, he added, “a complete update and renovation of existing weapons” has been completed.
The announcement follows Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent revelation 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 concern.
In televised remarks from a Russian military hospital, Putin described the unmanned torpedo — dubbed “Poseidon” — as “unstoppable,” capable of “travel[ling] faster than conventional submarines, div[ing] deep, and reach[ing] any continent in the world.” He asserted there was “no way to intercept” the system.
Trump, who had cancelled a planned summit with Putin in Budapest the prior week, criticised Russia’s missile tests, saying the Russian leader should “end the war in Ukraine instead of testing missiles.”
While Trump did not specify the exact nature or timing of the upcoming U.S. tests, he said the process would “begin immediately.”
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), there are nine nuclear-armed states, which together possess an estimated 12,331 warheads. Russia holds around 5,580, while the U.S. maintains roughly 5,044 warheads in its arsenal.
The U.S. last conducted a full-scale nuclear test in September 1992, when a 20-kiloton device was detonated underground at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site. The following month, then-President George H.W. Bush imposed a moratorium on further tests — a policy that successive U.S. administrations had maintained, relying instead on sub-critical experiments and computer simulations.
Trump’s decision, announced on the eve of his summit with Xi, is expected to intensify global concerns about a fresh arms race among the world’s major powers.
