On October 29, 2025, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he had instructed the Department of War (the rebranded Department of Defense) to “immediately” begin testing U.S. nuclear weapons “on an equal basis” with other nations. He made the announcement minutes before a scheduled meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea. The United States has not detonated a nuclear device since the Nevada Test Site moratorium took hold in 1992 — a pause that has held across six presidencies and is one of the quiet foundations of the global non-proliferation regime.
Trump's post: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” No U.S. official has publicly identified any nuclear test conducted by any country since the 2017 North Korea test, and Russia and China have both maintained public testing moratoria. The State Department's unclassified 2025 Compliance Report to Congress expressed concerns about Russian and Chinese transparency but did not assert either country had conducted a yield-producing nuclear test.
The order drew immediate pushback from arms-control organizations, from the scientific community, and from some members of Congress. The Arms Control Association called the directive a rupture in the “architecture of restraint” that has kept nuclear arsenals largely static since the end of the Cold War. Nuclear specialists warned that a resumed U.S. test would give Russia, China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea political cover and strategic incentive to resume their own testing programs.
A year and a half later, in an April 2026 iNews op-ed, Miles Taylor — former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump's first term — wrote that he believes Trump will detonate a nuclear device “before he leaves office, even if it's only a test.” Taylor describes emergency sessions DHS held in the first term, after Trump told advisers he wanted to strike North Korea with a nuclear weapon: “we held emergency sessions on strike scenarios against the US homeland, sessions we had never needed to conduct in the department's history.” Taylor notes that on the day North Korea test-launched a nuclear-capable ICBM in November 2017, Trump called DHS and wanted to talk about deportations, not the launch.
The practical significance is twofold. First, ending a 33-year moratorium — with no stated trigger event — invites imitation. Second, it narrows the range of non-nuclear options Trump's own advisers have when he reaches for the red button. The institutional dread every prior nuclear-age president eventually internalized — that these weapons exist to deter, not to use — is the constraint Trump has publicly rejected.