On Nuclear Weapons Testing, Confusion Reigns

Since we discussed the matter on the latest episode of The Editors, the Trump administration’s confusing effort to acclimate Americans to the prospect of resumed nuclear weapons testing has only grown more puzzling.

“They seem to all be nuclear testing,” the president recently said of our nuclear-capable adversaries abroad. “We don’t do testing — we halted it years ago. But with others doing testing, it’s appropriate that we do also.” If you take the president literally, it sounds like he’s recommending the resumption of non-zero yield tests — nuclear explosions of some sort. Some observers welcomed the prospect as a prudent accommodation with the reality of our aging nuclear arsenal. Others responded with understandable trepidation. It appears, however, that the president misrepresented his own policy.

“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests; these are not nuclear explosions,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy over the weekend. “These are what we call noncritical explosions. So, you’re testing all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to make sure they deliver the appropriate geometry and set up the nuclear explosion.”

That sounds a lot like a feature of the life-extension programs we already use to ensure the reliability of America’s nuclear warheads. Those LEPs take many forms, including the use of chemical explosives to simulate the stresses a warhead may experience in atmospheric reentry or detonation conditions. If that’s all the president was talking about, his announcement was an unremarkable one. It’s not clear why it even required an announcement at all.

Elsewhere in the administration, however, the president’s subordinates are putting meat on Trump’s proclamation that America’s adversaries are conducting nuclear tests that exceed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’s (CTBT) “zero-yield standard”:

“After consultations with Director Ratcliffe and his team, they have confirmed to me that the CIA assesses that both Russia and China have conducted super-critical nuclear weapons tests in excess of the U.S. zero-yield standard,” Senator Tom Cotton revealed Monday night. “These tests are not historic and are part of their nuclear modernization programs.”

Whether these Russian and Chinese tests are “super-critical” or “hydrodynamic” (in which conventional explosives are used to simulate implosion and study the behavior of weapons components) matters, but only to a point. Non-zero yield is non-zero yield. It is not clear, however, if the CIA’s assessment is designed to support the president’s contention that we should resume nuclear weapons tests or if it supports Chris Wright’s claim that we never stopped and will preserve the existing LEP regimen.

One thing we can say is that the logic implicit in the CIA’s assumption reveals why there is value in preserving the American prohibition on detonating nuclear weapons that has prevailed since 1992. If the administration’s rationale for the resumption of testing rests on their understanding that our enemies are testing, so we must as well, that works both ways. Indeed, that’s how it worked during the Cold War. If we shot off a bomb, they shot off a bigger one. When they moved their warheads around in provocative ways, so did we. That had nothing to do with determining whether these weapons worked. It was signaling, an effort to preserve the deterrent dynamic of assured reciprocity in the event of a nuclear attack.

Hence, our confusion today. Are we merely engaged in rote maintenance requirements, or are we signaling to our adversaries our nuclear capabilities? Those are not wholly unrelated enterprises, but they are distinct in important ways. The president has made American objectives in this realm about as clear as mud, and his subordinates are not doing much to clear up our confusion.