A Look Back at Nuclear Tests as Trump’s Order Revives a Dangerous Past

ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – In a move that abruptly shattered a decades-long global consensus and resurrected the specter of the Cold War's most terrifying chapter, President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he had directed the Pentagon to begin testing nuclear weapons, a stunning reversal of a 33-year-old American moratorium that has been a cornerstone of international arms control.

The President's directive, justified as a necessary response to keep pace with Russia and China, has ignited a firestorm of uncertainty and alarm, invoking the history of a perilous era when the world's superpowers engaged in a relentless and atmospheric game of nuclear one-upmanship, a terrifying display of destructive power that the world had, until now, seemingly left behind.

The President's social media post, which declared that the process would "begin immediately," was sparse on details, leaving open the critical question of whether the tests would involve live nuclear weapons.

His assertion that the move was necessary to act "on an equal basis" with Russia and China was immediately met with confusion, as neither country has conducted an explosive nuclear weapons test since the 1990s.

The announcement, however, has forcefully reopened a dark chapter of history, one that began in a flash of terrible light in the New Mexico desert and plunged humanity into an age of existential dread, a moment forever captured in the haunting words of the man who unleashed it.

'I Am Become Death': The Dawn of the Atomic Age

The history of nuclear testing is a story that begins in the stark desert landscape of Alamogordo, New Mexico. It was there, on July 16, 1945, amidst the final, brutal stages of World War II, that the United States conducted the first-ever test of an atomic bomb, code-named "Trinity."

In that moment, humanity crossed a threshold from which it could never return. The successful detonation ushered in the atomic age, and its creator, the brilliant and tormented physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, immediately understood the profound and terrible gravity of what his team had accomplished.

Recalling the moment of the explosion, Oppenheimer later said, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent." He then remembered a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, as the multi-armed god Vishnu declares, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Oppenheimer concluded, "I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

That premonition of apocalyptic power was realized just weeks later when the United States became the only country to use atomic bombs in an act of war, dropping two on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, causing unprecedented death and devastation.

As detailed in a historical overview by The Washington Post, the era of testing that followed this horrific debut was relentless. In the ensuing decades, as the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified, nuclear testing became a primary and highly visible symbol of national power and technological prowess.

The United States alone carried out more than 1,000 nuclear explosive tests between 1945 and 1992.

These tests, initially conducted in the atmosphere where they produced the iconic and terrifying mushroom clouds that came to define the age, were later moved underground to contain their radioactive fallout. But they were never just scientific experiments; they were geopolitical statements, each detonation a message of deterrence and a step up the ladder of a spiraling arms race.

The Soviet Union was not far behind. It conducted its first nuclear test in 1949 and, over the course of the Cold War, would carry out hundreds of its own detonations across the steppes of what is now Kazakhstan.

The last time Russia officially tested a nuclear weapon was in 1990, during the final, waning days of the Soviet Union.

China, the third major player in this atomic theater, joined the nuclear club in the 1960s and conducted its last known test in 1996. The world had become a laboratory for destruction, with more than 2,000 nuclear test explosions conducted around the globe since 1945, according to tracking from the Arms Control Association.

A Fragile Consensus: The Moratorium and the Test Ban Treaty

The relentless pace of testing during the Cold War created a global atmosphere of fear and protest, eventually leading to a gradual and hard-won international consensus to rein in the practice.

The first significant step was the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited explosions in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater, pushing all subsequent tests into deep underground caverns. The final, and most significant, step toward silence came with the end of the Cold War.

The last full-scale U.S. nuclear weapons test took place deep beneath the Nevada desert in 1992. Later that year, President George H.W. Bush announced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing, a policy of restraint that has been upheld by every subsequent administration, until now.

This informal halt was formalized in 1996 with the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), an international agreement that prohibits "any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion." The United States, Russia, and China are all signatories to this landmark treaty.

However, the CTBT has a complicated and ultimately unfulfilled history. It has never formally entered into force because several key countries, including the United States, have failed to ratify it.

Despite this, the core principle of the treaty—the moratorium on testing—has been observed as a powerful international norm for decades. With the notable exception of North Korea, which has conducted a series of tests in the 21st century, the world's nuclear powers have adhered to this informal but critical restraint.

A Puzzling Justification and Modern Realities

President Trump's directive appears to be based on the premise that Russia and China have been violating this moratorium. His comments follow a week of nuclear arms showboating from Moscow. On Wednesday, just before the President's post, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his forces had successfully tested a nuclear-powered torpedo called Poseidon.

This came just days after Putin praised the successful test of a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable cruise missile. However, as noted by The Washington Post, these are tests of the delivery systems, not of the nuclear warheads themselves.

During the first Trump administration, a senior U.S. official, Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr., did allege that Russia was "probably" conducting secret, low-yield nuclear tests in violation of the "zero-yield" standard, an accusation that Moscow has denied.

But there is no publicly available evidence of full-scale explosive tests by either Russia or China.

In fact, just this week, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Guo Jiakun, stated that his country had "faithfully honored its moratorium on nuclear testing" and would work to uphold the treaty.

China's nuclear program, while rapidly modernizing and expanding, remains significantly smaller than those of the U.S. and Russia.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that China possesses about 600 warheads, a number the Pentagon projects could surpass 1,000 by 2030. This is still considerably behind the estimated 3,700 and 4,300 warheads held by the U.S. and Russia, respectively.

The Unraveling of Restraint

The President's order has immediately raised fears that the United States is poised to unravel the very fabric of the global arms control regime. Russia already rescinded its ratification of the CTBT in 2023, citing Washington's own failure to ratify.

A resumption of U.S. testing would almost certainly be seen in Moscow and Beijing as a green light to restart their own testing programs, potentially triggering a new and destabilizing arms race. The practicalities of resuming tests are also daunting.

One expert told The Washington Post that the U.S. would likely need at least 36 months of preparation before it could conduct a contained underground nuclear test at its former site in Nevada, a sprawling expanse of desert that has lain dormant for over three decades.

As the world grapples with the implications of President Trump's announcement, the ghosts of a dangerous past have been reawakened.

The decades-long moratorium on nuclear testing was not just a technical agreement but a profound political and moral statement—a collective decision by the world's most powerful nations to step back from the brink that Oppenheimer had so terrifyingly described.

The President's order now threatens to reverse that historic progress, potentially reopening a Pandora's box of nuclear competition that the world had hoped was sealed shut with the end of the Cold War.

The mushroom clouds that once haunted the global imagination remain, for now, a feature of history books and old photographs. The question now is whether a new American policy is about to bring them roaring back to life.