Russian President Vladimir Putin today ordered his top officials to draft proposals on possible nuclear weapons testing. Putin was reacting to U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media posting last week, stating the U.S. would begin conducting new testing.
It remains unclear whether Trump was referring to restarting live nuclear detonations or tests on the reliability of warhead delivery systems, like the one conducted today with an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile, which already occur regularly. U.S. officials have appeared to clarify, at least to some degree, that Trump’s testing will be limited to delivery systems and the nuclear deterrent apparatus, not detonations. Still, there are questions as to his true intent, which could always change. Regardless, Russian officials “assess that Washington is aiming to prepare and conduct nuclear tests,” according to the official Russian TASS news outlet.
Given Trump’s Truth Social post, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov told Putin that it was “advisable to prepare for full-scale nuclear tests” immediately. He added that Russia’s Arctic testing site at Novaya Zemlya could host such tests at short notice. The site is widely believed to have been used for the recent launch systems test of Russia’s mysterious Burevestnik (also known to NATO as SSC-X-9 Skyfall) cruise missile
Belousov offered no further details, so we asked several nuclear weapons experts for their assessments on how quickly Russia could detonate a nuclear device – something it hasn’t done since 1990 – and what it would entail to make it happen. Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Hans
Kristensen — Director, Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists. Writes the bi-monthly Nuclear Notebook and the world nuclear forces overview in the SIPRI Yearbook.
“Short notice is relative. The quickest would be to drive a warhead into an existing tunnel and seal it off. But that wouldn’t give them any new data and probably risk a leak.
So, unless they already have one prepared, if they want to do a new fully instrumented test, I suspect it would involve preparing a tunnel, the device, and rigging all the cables and sensors to record that data. There has been a lot of tunnel-digging at Novaya Zemlya for quite some time for their existing experiments, so presumably a new fully instrumented test would be in addition to that.
Preparing a new one would probably take several months, possibly six-plus, but difficult to estimate because we don’t know what they already have prepared.“
Jon B. Wolfsthal, Director of Global Risk, American Federation of Scientists.
“Russia also has an active nuclear maintenance program as does the U.S. However, Russia tests near the Arctic Circle at Novaya Zemlya Island. As a result, they can really only – barring a real emergency – test in summer and late fall. So it would take them some time, and at least until next year.
However, if they want to gain a lot of technically useful data from a test, it may take them longer. Just to conduct a basic test could take less than 12 months. But as I have said, this is what an arms race looks like. Action/reaction cycles. Russia will test if we do. I suspect they will not if we do not.
I don’t know what Russia would test. It would not have to be a massive bomb to be useful. You generally only need to test the first stage of a thermonuclear device to get useful data. It could be as small as 1 to 5 kilotons or up to 15 to 20, but there is no way for people outside of the Russian scientific community to predict well.”
Daryl G. Kimball has been Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA) and publisher and contributor for the organization’s monthly journal, Arms Control Today, since September 2001.
“The U.S., China, and Russia all have ‘nuclear test readiness’ plans and I would assess that Russia would be able to resume nuclear explosive testing more quickly than the United States.
I just know it would be less than the optimistic 24-36 months for a full-scale underground contained nuclear test explosions at the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS). Russia would not be encumbered by the same safety and environmental safeguards and domestic political obstacles that the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would have to deal with in order to conduct a full-scale multi-kiloton nuclear explosion underground at the former U.S. nuclear test site in Nevada.
But, most importantly, there is no technical, military or political reason why Putin or Trump should order the resumption of nuclear explosive testing, and Defense Minister Belousov’s comments are counterproductive and irresponsible.
The United States and Russia deploy some 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads and they possess other sub-strategic nuclear weapons. Their arsenals consist of various, well-tested warhead types. The United States conducted more than 1,030 nuclear test explosions and Russia 715, the vast majority of which were to proof-test new warhead designs. Neither side needs to or wants to develop a new warhead, so any new nuclear test explosions would be purely for ‘show,’ which would be extremely irresponsible.“
Ankit
Panda — Expert on nuclear policy, Asia, missiles, & space. Stanton Senior Fellow, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Author of ‘Kim Jong Un and the Bomb.’
“We know from both open source and official U.S. assessments that the Russians maintain a relatively high level of test readiness at Novaya Zemlya. They’ve also strongly emphasized the parity principle on the testing issue, so it makes sense that they’d take these steps given Trump’s recent comments.
They want to be positioned so that if the U.S. tests, they can follow quickly. The specific timeline of Russian readiness is difficult to nail down, but they could test probably without significant instrumentation without much difficulty. I would think weeks if there was sufficient political demand for a rapid demonstration.“
Stephen
Schwartz — Editor/Co-author ‘Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940‘.
“The United States has an enormous advantage in nuclear testing over every other country in the world, partly because we conducted more tests than everyone else combined (1,030, involving 1,149 individual detonations), and because we have a very elaborate and well-funded ($345 billion to date) Stockpile Stewardship program. Since 1996, this has enabled us to ‘test’ our nuclear bombs and warheads via extremely powerful computers, eliminating the need for actual underground tests and providing us with critical insights into our weapons we could not obtain from physical nuclear testing alone.
So given that, and given Trump’s recent out-of-the-blue demand that we resume nuclear testing immediately, it is unfortunately not surprising that Russia is responding the way that it is. In Russia, as in the United States, there are political and military leaders and weapons scientists who have never given up on one day resuming nuclear testing. Russia, like the United States, has long maintained a readiness program to resume nuclear testing. It is an unfortunate escalation of at least rhetoric at this point, sliding the United States and Russia, and perhaps also China and maybe North Korea and other states further down the road toward resuming nuclear testing, which has not happened in decades.
Right now, we and the Russians conduct what are known as subcritical tests, which are tests that do not result in a nuclear yield, but nevertheless provide useful scientific information that can make our weapons more safe and reliable.
Russia could probably resume underground nuclear testing pretty quickly. Satellite imagery from 2023 and this past July indicates that they’ve been doing some work at the test site to expand the facilities there and potentially make them more ready to resume nuclear testing. I suspect Russia could probably do this faster than the United States. Our testing would take place in Nevada – at least that’s the only test site that we have available right now, and it would probably take on the order of one to three years (for the U.S.) to do a fully instrumented test.
We can’t see inside the [Russian] buildings that have gone up, so we don’t know exactly what’s going on there. But, if I have to guess, and it is only a guess, I would say a matter of several weeks to several months, perhaps [for a Russian test]. But it really depends on what their intentions are.
If they simply want to blow something up to demonstrate that they’ve returned to doing that kind of testing that can be done fairly quickly if they want to actually have a scientifically and militarily useful test where there’s all sorts of diagnostic equipment and they’re able to measure the results, and determine something about the test other than the fact that it simply went off, that could take more time.
If they’ve been planning and preparing, if they have personnel and equipment there, they could probably do something fairly quickly – on the very short end, potentially a matter of a few weeks to perhaps a few months. It could be longer; it could be a matter of six months. But again, if you only want to send a political message that we are resuming nuclear testing, you can take a nuclear bomb or warhead out of your stockpile and transport it to Novaya Zemlya, stick it in an underground tunnel, seal it off and detonate it.“
We reached out to the White House to see what concern, if any, they have about Putin’s order for proposals on how to resume nuclear testing. We are waiting for a response. The experts we spoke with, however, voiced their own worries.
“As for concerns, Russia’s testing could enable them to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons via computer simulations where now it is hard for them to do so,” explained Wolfsthal. “Russia could close the testing advantage the U.S. now possesses.”
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