Trump announces US will start testing nukes in break from 33 years of restraint

NEW YORK: President Donald Trump has announced that the US will start testing nuclear weapons "immediately" in a break from 33 years of the country's self-restraint.

Hours before his meeting with China's President Xi Jinping in South Korea on Thursday, he said in a cryptic post on Truth Social, "Because of other countries' testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis".

"That process will begin immediately", he added.

Trump said that the US had more nuclear weapons than any other country and this was due to "a complete update and renovation of existing weapons", during his first term. That was accomplished without any nuclear tests, which scientists say are not necessary anymore because computer simulations can do the job.

Trump wrote that he had "no choice" but to expand the nuclear arsenal although he hated it, because "Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years".

Elements in his post were unclear. For example, he said he was ordering the nuclear tests "because of other countries' testing programmes".

Only North Korea, across from where he made the post, has carried out a nuclear test in recent years, and that was in 2017. There have been no other tests since 1998, when India and Pakistan set off test blasts.

The last nuclear weapon test by the US was in 1992, by China in 1996 and by Russia's predecessor, the Soviet Union, in 1990.

NATO allies France's last test was in 1996, and Britain's was in 1991 at the US facility in Nevada.

Both India and Pakistan had their last nuclear tests in 1998.

What provoked Trump to order the tests may have been Russia's President Vladimir Putin's boasts this week that his country had successfully tested two nuclear-powered systems. (IANS)

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