An ally of newly-minted president Donald Trump's is arguing that the United States should resume nuclear weapons testing to send a message to its adversaries.

Robert Peters, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind the controversial Project 2025, argued in a thread on X-formerly-Twitter that the "US must be ready to test nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site within 3-6 months of being ordered to conduct a nuclear explosive test."

"Such a test would occur if there were unforeseen 'political' reasons why a President would want to test one as part of a signaling campaign during an acute crisis or even conflict," Peters added in a followup, adding that it would "allow the US to conduct open-air nuclear testing within the US or in the Pacific over open water or uninhabited atoll."

Emphasis on the "open-air," which would be a massive reversal for the country, effectively withdrawing the US from treaties ratified in the 1960s.

The thing is, there's a reason we stopped testing nuclear weapons, especially in the open air, which sends radioactive material dozens of miles into the atmosphere, spiking cancer rates in people living nearby. No country except North Korea has detonated a nuclear bomb in a test since the 1990s, and open-air tests were banned by the international community in the 1960s.

That's a good thing; the practice was immensely dangerous and destructive for a wide variety of reasons, as nuclear weapons expert Stephen Schwartz wrote in a series of posts on Bluesky.

"Needless to say — except, apparently, for Bob and those who share his single-minded but retrograde point of view — such a monumental reversal would be foolish and dangerously counterproductive, (giving carte blanche to every other nuclear-weapon state) environmentally destructive, and hugely expensive," Schwartz wrote.

Schwartz pointed to the calamitous damage caused by 100 nuclear devices being detonated at the Nevada test site where Peters suggested new blasts between 1951 and 1962. Communities downwind from the site have suffered from radiation exposure, leading to a variety of diseases, including thyroid cancer and leukemia. The tests also contaminated nearby soil and groundwater.

And that's not to mention the destabilizing consequences such a show of force would have on the international stage.

Whether Trump is listening to the nuts in his orbit is a separate question. During a speech at the World Economic Forum on Thursday, Trump said that "we’d like to see denuclearization."

"I will tell you that [Russian] president Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear, and I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow," he said. "And China too, China liked it."

Whether Putin really wants to pull back on nuclear force, despite spending millions to upgrade its nuclear stockpiles and continuously reminding NATO members of its existence, remains dubious at best. The Pentagon also believes that China is looking to expand its arsenal of warheads to 1,000 by 2030.

One thing's for sure: nobody, anywhere in the world, wants to see more open-air nuclear tests.

More on nuclear weapons: General in Charge of Nuclear Weapons Says Heck, Let's Add Some AI


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