00:00It's been 33 years since the United States last tested a nuclear weapon.
00:07U.S. President Donald Trump may end that streak after a surprise announcement made only minutes
00:12before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
00:16Trump said he's instructing the Pentagon to test the U.S. nuclear arsenal on a quote
00:20equal basis with other nuclear powers like China and Russia.
00:25But why did the U.S. ever stop nuclear testing?
00:28They were the ones who opened the nuclear era by detonating a 20-kiloton atomic bomb in New Mexico in July 1945.
00:36A month later, they struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs to force Japan to surrender in World War II.
00:44Thus began five decades of nuclear tests around the globe.
00:49The United Nations says some 2,000 tests were carried out, with the U.S. accounting for 1,032 of them.
00:56By negotiating a treaty to freeze the production of fissile materials for use in nuclear weapons.
01:02That mostly wound down after 1996 with the Comprehensive Nuclear Ban Treaty.
01:08It forbids nuclear explosions by everyone, everywhere.
01:12Heather Williams is a nuclear weapons expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
01:17The last U.S. nuclear test was in 1992.
01:22This was largely driven by public outcry, the environmental impacts, the humanitarian consequences associated with nuclear testing.
01:30But also, there was a growing international movement to do away with nuclear testing.
01:36Russia ratified the treaty in the year 2000.
01:39Then, in 2023, President Vladimir Putin rolled that ratification back.
01:43The U.S. signed it, but never ratified it.
01:47So what would testing do for the U.S., and why now?
01:51Testing new weapons would offer what any test can, evidence of what they can do.
01:56And testing older weapons would check if they can still work.
01:59And for the Trump administration, this may have been under consideration for some time.
02:04In 2020, the Washington Post reported that the first Trump administration had talked about whether or not to conduct a test.
02:10As to the timing, any U.S. test would be seen by Russia and China as a deliberate flex of U.S. power.
02:17Putin has said that if the U.S. resumed testing, Russia would, too.
02:22While post-Soviet Russia has never held a test, days before Trump's announcement,
02:26they tested a nuclear-powered cruise missile, nuclear-powered autonomous torpedo,
02:30and held a nuclear readiness drill all in the span of a week.
02:34Putin has also said a global nuclear arms race is already underway.
02:39And Trump has justified his decision by claiming other countries are already testing.
02:43Other countries do it. If they're going to do it, we're going to do it.
02:47However, Williams says a U.S. testing restart may help Beijing the most.
02:52The United States conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests.
02:56Russia conducted over 700.
02:58China has done less than 100 nuclear tests.
03:02And a lot of Chinese experts and officials have pointed out that China might be at a disadvantage
03:07in terms of knowledge of its arsenal and weapons designs because it just doesn't have as much testing data.
03:12And so if the taboo against nuclear testing was broken,
03:17if there was a return to more nuclear tests,
03:20China stands to gain way more from this than the United States would.
03:23The world once hosted some 70,000 nuclear weapons at the height of Cold War stockpiling in 1986.
03:31Now that number is closer to 12,000, most of which are held by Russia and the U.S.
03:36China is number three, with a stockpile that has doubled to 600 in the past five years under Xi Jinping.
03:42All three are undergoing major modernizations of their arsenals.
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