Experts are calling Donald Trump's former national security advisor's proposal to resume detonating nuclear weapons after a three-decade pause a "terrible idea," as he insists that "if you want peace, prepare for war."
Robert C. O’Brien made his case in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs magazine that the United States ought to bring back nuclear weapons testing as China and Russia have "modernized their nuclear arsenals."
China's arsenal has doubled in the last four years, he said, calling it a "massive, unexplained, and unwarranted expansion."
"The United States has to maintain technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles," wrote O’Brien.
To do so, he argues Washington "must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992—not just by using computer models."
"If China and Russia continue to refuse to engage in good-faith arms control talks, the United States should also resume production of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the primary fissile isotopes of nuclear weapons," said O’Brien.
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He added that the U.S. also needs to transform its conventional weapons arsenal, including a "massive investment" in hypersonic missiles under a possible second Trump term.
The United States last conducted an underground nuclear test in 1992, and other superpowers eventually did the same. Such testing often happened in places such as Nevada, the Pacific Ocean and other remote areas. The nation instead used experts and supercomputers to determine the effectiveness of the weapons — a method O’Brien criticizes in his piece.
Ernest Moniz, who oversaw the country's nuclear arsenal during the Obama administration, called it a "terrible idea."
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“New testing would make us less secure," he told The New York Times on Friday. "You can’t divorce it from the global repercussions.”
Siegfried Hecker, former director at Los Alamos in New Mexico, told the Times America "stand[s] to lose more” than its adversaries.
Walter Pincus, who has written about nuclear weapons, testing, and national security for more than 60 years, wrote in March for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that resuming such testing would be a "grave mistake" for many reasons — "chief among them is that it forgets the horrific health effects that resulted from some previous nuclear tests."
Russia withdrew its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in November, though Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the country would not resume nuclear testing “unless the United States does so."
François Diaz-Maurin, associate editor for nuclear affairs at the bulletin, wrote in the same issue that experts believe both Russia and China are expanding underground tunnels at nuclear test sites, and similarly the United States, has expanded its test site in Nevada.
"In this game of who-moves-first, other nuclear-armed countries are watching closely," wrote Diaz-Maurin.
