The United States is unlikely to test nuclear weapons, despite what Trump says.

US President Donald Trump has said his country will resume nuclear weapons testing after a decades-long ban. But researchers speaking to New scientist They claim that such tests have no scientific necessity and would be purely symbolic, disturbing to world peace and likely to spark protests among American citizens. In short, this is unlikely to happen – but that doesn’t mean this announcement is entirely innocuous.

Trump announced the new policy in an article on Truth Social, saying that due to “other countries [sic] testing programs, I have asked the War Department to begin testing our nuclear weapons on an equal footing. This process will begin immediately.

The announcement was light on detail, but it also confused experts because no other country is currently testing nuclear bombs. Russia recently demonstrated a nuclear-powered underwater drone and a nuclear-powered missile, but neither were actually nuclear detonations.

Certainly, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there were signs that several countries were preparing their historic nuclear weapons testing sites – whether with the actual intention of conducting further testing or simply for political posturing. Modernization work took place at China’s test site in the far-western Xinjiang region, as well as Russia’s in an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean and the US test site in the Nevada desert.

But new tests would run counter to decades of difficult but effective bans. The Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union in 1963, prohibiting testing of these weapons in the atmosphere, underwater or in space, but allowing underground testing. Then, in 1996, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) theoretically ended underground testing as well, and although it was never technically ratified, it was effective.

More than 2,000 tests took place between the first American detonation, Trinity, in 1945 and the writing of the CTBT. Since then, India and Pakistan have each conducted a handful of tests in 1998, while North Korea is the only country to have tested a nuclear weapon in the 21st century, with its last test taking place in 2017. The United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992.

In this context, most experts doubt that President Trump – who has made clear his desire to receive the Nobel Peace Prize – can lead the United States to become the first global superpower to resume nuclear testing.

John Preston of the University of Essex, UK, believes the president’s statement could be just “Trumpian rhetoric” with no real intention to detonate nuclear weapons, but warns that even that could be dangerous. Historically, Soviet and Russian strategy has been to escalate and then deescalate, he says, moving aggressively to force adversaries to step back.

Preston says that during the Cold War, nuclear powers spent a lot of time and energy bringing in experts from a variety of fields to understand exactly how nuclear weapons testing and proliferation could escalate the conflict. But since then, this issue has become less central and the subject has become very secretive in general.

“In policy circles, in nuclear strategy circles, I worry that there’s probably less understanding of the scale of escalation,” Preston says. “All the science is really known about the effects of nuclear weapons. There is nothing left to know. So this would be purely symbolic and would just take us down a ladder of escalation that we no longer really understand.”

There would certainly be few scientific results to be gained from such an approach. Today, nuclear tests are carried out with extreme precision in physical simulations on large supercomputers. The two most powerful computers in the world (at least among those publicly available) are both operated by the US government and are used to ensure the effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrent without the need for physical testing.

Christoph Laucht of Swansea University in the UK says a resumption of testing would be a step backwards at a dangerous moment in history. The New START treaty is set to expire on February 4, 2026, and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty has already ended, meaning Russia and the United States will be just months away from having a formal nuclear treaty in place, with little chance of reaching new agreements in the current tense geopolitical climate.

“I think there is a legitimate concern that this could be the start of a new type of nuclear arms race,” Laucht says. “We still have a lot of nuclear warheads, but we are actually moving, in terms of treaties, towards something comparable to the beginning of the Cold War, when there was no arms control treaty.”

The risk is that if one country resumes testing, others will feel obliged to do the same, says Laucht. And the tests would likely draw protests from environmental groups, peace activists and citizens near the Nevada test site, making an already polarized United States even more tense.

Sara Pozzi of the University of Michigan bluntly argues that resuming nuclear explosive testing makes no sense for the United States. “It would undermine global stability, prompt other countries to restart their own nuclear explosive testing programs, and threaten decades of progress toward nuclear arms control,” she said. “Instead, the United States should continue to lead by example and help strengthen global efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation.” »

There is, of course, another argument: Trump, characteristically, has been quick to post mercurial, unspecific, and vague statements on social media that don’t tell the whole story.

Nick Ritchie of the University of York, UK, says Trump may well be talking simply about testing nuclear delivery technologies, like the missiles that launch them, rather than the warheads themselves – especially since a resumption of nuclear warhead testing would likely mean years of planning, engineering and policy work that would extend beyond his presidency. But if this is the case, confusion remains, because these technologies are and always have been tested regularly, alongside those of NATO allies.

“It’s a very Trumpian way of communicating on all sorts of political issues, including very potentially destabilizing and dangerous issues like US nuclear weapons policy,” says Ritchie. “It’s possible that I’m wrong and that preparations are very advanced for a return to nuclear testing, but I certainly haven’t seen any indication of that.”