Name: Why did the U.S. stop nuclear testing, and why is it starting again?
Uploaded: 2025-11-04T00:49:04.541Z
Duration: 3 min 49 s
Description: U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. military to resume testing nuclear weapons after a gap of 33 years. How many nuclear weapons tests have there been, why were they stopped - and why would anyone start them again?

U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. military to resume testing nuclear weapons after a gap of 33 years. How many nuclear weapons tests have there been, why were they stopped - and why would anyone start them again?

Washington

The United States has not conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1992, largely due to public opposition, environmental concerns, and international efforts to curb nuclear testing. President Donald Trump has announced plans to potentially resume testing, stating the need to maintain parity with other nuclear powers such as China and Russia.

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, adopted in 1996, forbids nuclear explosions worldwide, though the US has signed but not ratified it. Experts note that renewed US testing could benefit China, which has conducted fewer tests and could gain valuable data. The global nuclear arsenal has declined since the Cold War, but the US, Russia, and China are all modernizing their stockpiles.

Why did the U.S. stop nuclear testing, and why is it starting again?

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

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