Donald Trump Is Playing a Dangerous Game of Nuclear Poke

A 1952 nuclear detonation at the Nevada Proving Grounds, just one year after it first opened on Western Shoshone Indian land, which Trump has ordered to prepare for resuming tests. Photograph by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

As reported by W.J. Hennigan in TIME Magazine.

The article reports that, late last year, the Trump administration ordered the Nevada nuclear weapons test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to be ready to conduct full-scale underground nuclear weapons test within six months' notice.

However, the article reports, this...

is not enough time to install the warhead in shafts as deep as 4,000 ft. and affix all the proper technical instrumentation and diagnostics equipment. But the purpose of such a detonation, which the Administration labels “a simple test, with waivers and simplified processes,” would not be to ensure that the nation’s most powerful weapons were in operational order, or to check whether a new type of warhead worked, a TIME review of nuclear-policy documents has found. Rather, a National Nuclear Security Administration official tells TIME, such a test would be “conducted for political purposes.”

The point, this and other sources say, would be to show Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Iran’s Ayatullah Ali Khamenei and other adversaries what they are up against.

The last full-scale nuclear weapons test was carried out at the Nevada Test Site in Sept. 1992. However, sub-critical nuclear weapons tests (conventional explosions conducted with plutonium, the data from which are put into super computers to advance U.S. nuclear weapons designs) have been carried out there since. 

The National Security Archives reported several years ago, based on previously secret documents it wrested from the U.S. government, that one-third of underground nuclear weapons tests in Nevada from 1951 to 1992, leaked hazardous radioactivity to the environment. 

William Perry, who served as Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary, warns in the article "The risk for nuclear conflict today is higher than it was during the Cold War.” This is due to new dynamics, including the fact that it's not just a bipolar, two-Superpowers show down and "balance of terror" (deterrence through "mutually assured destruction," MAD), but rather a multi-faceted stand off, with numerous nuclear-armed adversaries, including in regions of hot warfare. Perry, who served as a senior advisor to JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis, shared at a National Cathedral event several weeks ago that he went to bed each of those fateful 13 nights in October 1962 thinking it would be his last night on Earth.

The article also quotes Sam Nunn, the former Democratic U.S. Senator from Georgia:

“We have severe erosion [of nuclear weapons arms control treaties],” Nunn says. “We are going into a period of much greater risk in the nuclear arena.”

William Perry and Sam Nunn joined with Henry Kissinger and John Deutch several long years ago now, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, warning that the U.S. had better lead the way on nuclear weapons abolition, or might just live to regret it. They cited the risk of nuclear war as an existential threat to the United States. Rather than ensure U.S. survival in a dangerous world, through supposed deterrence and MAD, nuclear weapons themselves have now become a leading danger to U.S. survival in an ever more dangerous, and nuclear-armed, world.