A surprise announcement for someone seeking the Nobel Peace Prize. US President Donald Trump ordered, this Thursday, October 30, the resumption of nuclear weapons testing in the country.
“Due to the testing programs carried out by other countries, I have requested the War Department to begin testing our nuclear weapons on equal terms. This process will begin immediately,” he declared on his social network, Truth Social. This announcement came just before his meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, as part of the US president’s tour of Asia.
When he talks about “other countries,” the occupant of the Oval Office is mainly referring to Russia. Vladimir Putin recently celebrated the success of two tests: a cruise missile “with unlimited range,” according to him, and an underwater drone with nuclear capability.
Nine trials for Operation Julín
The last US nuclear tests date back more than 30 years. It was Operation Julin, carried out between 1991 and 1992. The nine tests of this operation took place underground. In fact, these underground tests became mandatory to avoid atmospheric radioactive fallout, after the ratification of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.
This Julin operation began on October 18, 1991 with a test called “Lubbock” with an explosive power of 53 kilotons, at the Nevada test site.
Among the nine tests carried out within the framework of this Julin operation, some had the objective of evaluating nuclear capabilities and power, but others, such as the Hunters Trophy test of September 19, 1992, “had the objective of studying the effects of nuclear weapons, and not their performance, generally analyzed in vertical wells,” according to the American national laboratory Lawrence Livermore.
“We feel the ground shake”
Wendee Brunish, a physicist who worked on Operation Julin, says her role was to ensure that no radiation left the test site. “She was responsible for informing other scientists when they could recover their data after the shot,” the US national laboratory in Los Alamos specified in 2021.
“We were in this big war room […] with all these controllers, designers and diagnostic physicists. It would go off, we would wait five or ten minutes and then everyone would turn to me and ask, ‘When can we come back?'” he recalls.
“We felt the ground shake,” says Wendee Brunish, who specifies that they were about fifteen kilometers from the scene of the shooting. To avoid radiation on the animals, especially the antelopes, very powerful noises were emitted before the shots.
Operation Julin ended on September 23 with the test called “Divisor” with an explosive power of 5 kt.
Russia has 4,309 nuclear warheads deployed
“Underground nuclear testing was finally banned in 1996 by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits all nuclear explosions on Earth,” the United Nations says.
It is still difficult to know what the tests mentioned by Donald Trump this Thursday will be like and whether it is a real announcement or a deterrence method.
The latter also welcomed the US nuclear arsenal. “The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country. Russia is second and China a distant third, but it will catch up within five years,” he said.
That’s not entirely true. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), Russia has 4,309 nuclear warheads deployed or stored compared to 3,700 in the United States and 600 in China.
Source: BFM TV
