2024-08-05 19:22:23
If the US is the first to attempt to resume nuclear weapons testing, it will quickly discover how naive it was.
As reported by Day.Az with reference to RBC, Foreign Affairs writes about this.
The United States has technical superiority in its nuclear arsenal only because Russia and China have stopped testing and Washington has invested heavily in research, the publication points out.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s potential team is once again pushing the idea of the United States resuming nuclear weapons testing. But if that happens, Russia and China are likely to follow suit. Other countries, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, which could build weapons, could also begin testing. That would make the United States’ nuclear adversaries even more capable, Foreign Affairs writes.
The publication recalls that supporters of the use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki believed that the United States would have a nuclear monopoly over the Soviet Union for decades. However, Moscow got its own bomb in less than four years. Then they claimed that the development of the hydrogen bomb would return Washington to leadership. The USSR got it less than two years after the United States, and then other countries, including China, did the same.
Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, writing in Foreign Affairs, suggested that the United States should resume underground nuclear tests in the Nevada desert.
“The United States needs to maintain a technological and quantitative advantage over the combined nuclear arsenals of China and Russia,” O’Brien said. To do this, he said, Washington must test new nuclear weapons “in reality, not just in computer models” for the first time since 1992.
The country has conducted more nuclear explosions (1,149) than Russia (969) and China (45) combined. However, “the US has almost never taken a nuclear weapon out of its arsenal and tested it by detonating it in the desert,” the publication notes.
The United States stopped testing in 1992 and in 1996 signed, but did not ratify (as did China), the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT).
The country had a technological advantage at the time, including fiber-optic cables and supercomputers that were vastly superior to those in Russia and China. The U.S. also had a research infrastructure, including the PULSE Underground Laboratory for Subcritical Experiments, which tests small amounts of plutonium to understand how nuclear weapons work without actually testing them, the publication notes.
Subscribe to our WhatsApp channel and stay up to date with the latest news!