US President Donald Trump speaks during a bilateral meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 25, 2025. Trump on Monday suggested that a "purge or revolution" was underway in South Korea, hours before new President Lee Jae Myung was due at the White House. He did not specify to what he was referring but said he would bring it up with Lee. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP)
US President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he has directed the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, matching the programs of Russia and China. The declaration came just minutes before his high-stakes summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea.
The announcement followed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim a day earlier that Moscow had successfully tested a nuclear-capable, nuclear-powered underwater drone defying repeated U.S. warnings.
“Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote in a social media post referencing Russia and China.
Trump boasted that the United States possesses more nuclear weapons than any other nation, crediting his administration for what he described as a “complete update and renovation” of the arsenal.
He added that “Russia is second, and China is a distant third but will be even within five years.”
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), nine countries currently possess nuclear weapons the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. ICAN estimates that of roughly 12,331 nuclear warheads globally, Russia holds about 5,580 and the U.S. 5,044.
While Trump provided no details on the nature of the upcoming tests, he said the process would “begin immediately.”
Putin on Wednesday announced that Russia had tested its “Poseidon” underwater nuclear drone claiming it could travel faster and deeper than any submarine and reach “any continent in the world.”
The announcement came just days after another Russian weapons test involving a cruise missile.
From a Russian military hospital treating soldiers wounded in Ukraine, Putin declared that Poseidon was “impossible to intercept.”
In response, Trump urged Putin to “end the war in Ukraine instead of testing missiles.” A planned summit between the two leaders in Budapest last week was canceled.
Recalled that between 1945 and 1992, the United States conducted 1,054 nuclear tests. The last occurred in September 1992 at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, after which President George H.W. Bush imposed a moratorium on further tests. Successive administrations maintained that ban, replacing explosive tests with advanced computer simulations.
Trump’s new directive marks the first formal reversal of that policy in over three decades.
AFP
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