ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump reaffirmed on Friday, October 31, 2026, that the United States will resume testing nuclear weapons, but he pointedly refused to say whether that means underground nuclear explosions for the first time since 1992. Asked by a journalist whether he meant underground blasts, Trump replied: "I am not going to say." Then he added the line that has kept the world guessing: "You'll find out very soon, but we're going to do some testing, yeah. Other countries do it. If they're going to do it, we're going to do it, OK?"
The remarks, made to reporters aboard Air Force One as Trump flew to spend Halloween at his golf resort in Florida, came barely a day after his surprise order on Thursday, October 30, instructing the Department of War to start testing American nuclear weapons "on an equal basis" with other nuclear powers. That order, posted on social media while Trump was aboard Marine One heading to Busan, South Korea, for trade talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, ended — or appeared to end — a 33-year pause in American nuclear explosive testing, and it has provoked confusion in Washington, alarm among arms-control experts and sharp reactions from Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and the United Nations.
Trump's second round of comments did little to clear up the central question: what kind of "testing" does he actually mean? The distinction matters enormously. The United States military routinely conducts flight tests of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads — that has never stopped. What stopped in 1992 was the detonation of actual nuclear explosive devices, carried out by the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Nevada test site. Trump's posts and remarks have blurred the two, sometimes in the same breath, and officials have offered no detailed clarification since.
On Thursday, Trump wrote that the United States has "more Nuclear Weapons than any other country", crediting his first term in office for what he described as a "complete update and renovation" of the American arsenal. "Because of the tremendous destructive power, I HATED to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even within 5 years," he wrote. He said the testing process would "begin immediately", but gave no date, no location and no description of what would be tested.
On Friday, aboard Air Force One, he repeated the core argument — that other countries test, so America should test too — without filling in any of those blanks. "Other countries do it. If they're going to do it, we're going to do it, OK?" he said. He also said test sites would be determined later, and he again spoke warmly of denuclearisation in the abstract, saying he would welcome a world with fewer nuclear weapons even as he ordered testing to resume. The result is a policy that is simultaneously emphatic and undefined: a presidential order to do something, with the something itself still unexplained.
The confusion has reached the very top of the American nuclear command. Vice Admiral Richard Correll, Trump's nominee to lead the military command overseeing the US nuclear arsenal, told senators during his confirmation hearing that he could not interpret the president's remarks. "I'm not reading anything into it or reading anything out of it," Correll said — an unusually candid admission from an officer nominated to run the arsenal at the centre of the storm.
To understand why this announcement has shaken the arms-control world, it helps to know how long the pause has lasted and what it rests on. The last American nuclear test explosion was on September 23, 1992: a 20-kiloton underground detonation at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site, about 65 miles north-west of Las Vegas. Codenamed Divider, it was the 1,054th nuclear test conducted by the United States since the first, in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Weeks later, then-President George H. W. Bush imposed a moratorium on further tests in October 1992, and every administration since has continued it.
The United States signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1996, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes, but it has never ratified the treaty. It has nevertheless adhered to its provisions, as have all other nuclear-armed states except North Korea, the only country to have carried out an explosive nuclear test this century. Russia last tested in 1990, when it was still the Soviet Union, and China in 1996. Russia withdrew its ratification of the test-ban treaty in 2023, saying it wanted parity with Washington and would only resume tests if the United States did so first.
Trump's order arrived days after Russia announced two high-profile weapons trials: the Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered cruise missile said to have effectively unlimited range, tested on October 21, and the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered underwater drone, tested on October 28. Neither was a nuclear explosion — both were delivery systems, not warheads — but Trump denounced the Russian tests and then cited "other countries' testing programs" as his reason for acting. That framing is precisely what Moscow disputes.
There is also a practical timeline problem. Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, said it would take the United States at least 36 months to resume contained underground nuclear tests at the former Nevada test site, which has been maintained but not used for explosive testing for more than three decades. In other words, even if Trump means explosive tests, none could happen quickly — which makes the "you'll find out very soon" promise read more like a signal than a schedule.
The announcement also lands in a crowded strategic moment. The last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the United States and Russia, New START, which limits each side to 1,550 warheads on deployed long-range missiles, is nearing expiry, according to arms-control reporting. And the order came just three days before the November 3 midterm elections, in the middle of a campaign in which Trump has repeatedly presented himself as the candidate of American strength. None of that proves a political motive, but it explains why the timing is being watched as closely as the substance.
The Trump nuclear testing plan has drawn a fast and unusually broad reaction, and the pattern of it is revealing: allies and adversaries alike have urged restraint, while the Pentagon has moved to carry out the order. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, speaking to reporters in Kuala Lumpur, said the Pentagon was moving "quickly" to follow Trump's orders and described testing as a "very responsible way" to sustain deterrence. "The president was clear. We need to have a credible nuclear deterrent," Hegseth said. "Resuming testing is a pretty responsible, very responsible way to do that. I think it makes nuclear conflict less likely." He added that the Pentagon would coordinate with the Department of Energy, which oversees the nuclear weapons laboratories.
Moscow's response has been cautious but pointed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia had not carried out a nuclear test, that the recent Burevestnik and Poseidon trials "cannot in any way be interpreted as a nuclear test", and that "we hope that the information was conveyed correctly to President Trump". Peskov also repeated President Vladimir Putin's long-standing position: if any country departs from the moratorium, Russia will act accordingly. In short, Moscow is not testing — but it is openly reserving the right to match Washington if Washington goes first.
China's foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun urged the United States to "earnestly abide" by the global nuclear testing ban, and Beijing has previously called it unreasonable and unrealistic to ask China to join disarmament negotiations with the two much larger arsenals while its own stockpile remains far smaller. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia holds 4,309 deployed and stored warheads, compared with 3,700 for the United States and 600 for China — figures that do not count hundreds more warheads awaiting dismantlement. Those numbers are part of why Beijing bristles at being treated as an equal party in any testing race.
Iran, whose nuclear programme was bombed by US forces on Trump's orders earlier this year, reacted with fury. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi called the directive "regressive and irresponsible" and wrote: "A nuclear-armed bully is resuming testing of atomic weapons. The same bully has been demonizing Iran's peaceful nuclear program." United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said through a spokesman that "nuclear testing can never be permitted under any circumstances". And Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese atomic-bomb survivors group that won the Nobel Peace Prize, sent a letter of protest to the US embassy in Japan, saying the order "directly contradicts the efforts by nations around the world striving for a peaceful world without nuclear weapons and is utterly unacceptable".
The quotes that matter most in this story are the ones that refuse to resolve it. Trump himself, aboard Air Force One: "I am not going to say." And then: "You'll find out very soon, but we're going to do some testing, yeah. Other countries do it. If they're going to do it, we're going to do it, OK?" Earlier, on Air Force One after the Xi meeting, he had said much the same thing in different words: "With others doing testing, I think it's appropriate that we do also," adding that test sites would be announced later.
From the Pentagon, Hegseth's defence is the administration's clearest statement of intent so far: "We're moving out quickly," he said, calling testing "a very responsible way" to sustain deterrence and arguing that it "makes nuclear conflict less likely". From the nominee who would oversee the arsenal, the opposite tone: Correll's "I'm not reading anything into it or reading anything out of it" captures how even senior military figures are waiting for the order to be translated into something concrete.
The critics have been blunter. Representative Dina Titus, a Democrat from Nevada — the state that would host any resumed underground tests — said on social media: "I'll be introducing legislation to put a stop to this." Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, said: "Trump is misinformed and out of touch. The US has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing for the first time since 1992," warning that the move could "trigger a chain reaction of nuclear testing by US adversaries, and blow apart the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty". No direct quotes from Nevada residents or test-site workers were carried in the reports read for this article, so this section records the public statements available rather than inventing any.
This matters first because the testing moratorium is one of the few arms-control norms that has held for more than three decades, across Republican and Democratic administrations, through wars, crises and changes of government in Moscow and Beijing. It survived because it served everyone: no country needed explosive tests to maintain a credible deterrent, thanks to supercomputer simulations and non-explosive laboratory work, and every country benefited from the certainty that rivals were not secretly perfecting new warhead designs underground. Breaking it — or even credibly threatening to break it — removes that certainty, and certainty is the currency of nuclear stability.
It matters second because of the chain-reaction risk Kimball and others warn about. If the United States detonates a device, Russia has said it will respond in kind, and China would face enormous pressure to do the same. North Korea, the one country that has already broken the moratorium, would gain a precedent. The Non-Proliferation Treaty, already strained by the war in Ukraine and the collapse of other arms agreements, would lose one of its last load-bearing pillars: the shared understanding that the established nuclear powers do not test.
It matters third for American domestic politics, and not only because of the midterms. Any resumed testing would happen in Nevada, a state whose residents lived through decades of above-ground and underground tests and the fallout debates that followed. A legislative fight led by Nevada's own congressional delegation is already promised. And it matters for the budget and the bureaucracy: rebuilding a test capability mothballed for 33 years would take years and billions, at a moment when the Pentagon is already funding a sweeping modernisation of the arsenal Trump himself cites as his achievement.
Finally, it matters because ambiguity itself is a strategy — and a risky one. Keeping rivals guessing about whether America will test, and what it will test, may be intended as leverage. But nuclear ambiguity cuts both ways: it can also be misread. When the Kremlin says it hopes "the information was conveyed correctly" to Trump, it is politely saying it fears a misunderstanding. In nuclear affairs, misunderstandings are the thing the whole post-Cold War architecture was built to prevent.
The immediate test of Trump's words will be bureaucratic, not explosive. Watch for the Pentagon and the Department of Energy to publish — or decline to publish — implementation guidance: what is to be tested, where, and on what timeline. Watch for whether the administration requests funding or personnel for the Nevada site, and whether it notifies Congress. A flight test of a nuclear-capable missile, of the kind the military already conducts routinely, would confirm the narrower reading of the order. Any move toward preparing an underground shaft at Nevada would confirm the wider one — and would be visible, and controversial, long before any detonation.
Watch, too, for the legislative response. Titus's promised bill is unlikely to pass a Congress in its final days before an election, but it signals the shape of the domestic fight: Nevada's delegation, arms-control groups and Democrats framing testing as dangerous and unnecessary, against an administration framing it as deterrence. Internationally, the next moves belong to Moscow and Beijing: whether they treat Trump's words as rhetoric or as a countdown, and whether either side uses the coming weeks to propose talks — Trump himself has said he favours "denuclearisation" and claims to be "actually talking to Russia about that", without elaborating.
And watch the calendar. The midterms on November 3 will show whether voters reward or punish this kind of muscular signalling. The New START expiry will force a decision about the future of US-Russia arms control regardless of testing. And Trump's own promise — "you'll find out very soon" — sets a clock of its own. If nothing concrete follows, the episode will be remembered as a scare. If something does, it will be remembered as the week the 33-year pause ended.
Did Trump order the US to resume nuclear testing?
Yes. On October 30, 2026, Trump instructed the Department of War to start testing US nuclear weapons "on an equal basis", and on October 31 he reaffirmed the plan aboard Air Force One, saying "you'll find out very soon".
Does that mean underground nuclear explosions will return?
That is still unclear. Trump refused to say whether he meant underground blasts, and his remarks could also refer to flight tests of nuclear-capable missiles, which the US already conducts routinely.
When did the US last detonate a nuclear weapon?
On September 23, 1992, a 20-kiloton underground test at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site. President George H. W. Bush imposed a moratorium weeks later, continued by every administration since.
How have Russia and China responded?
Russia says its recent Burevestnik and Poseidon trials were not nuclear tests, but warns it will match the US if Washington resumes testing. China has urged the US to abide by the global testing ban.
Could the US test quickly if it wanted to?
Experts say no: the Arms Control Association estimates at least 36 months to resume contained underground tests at the Nevada site after a 33-year gap.
Related coverage on US News Pulse: Trump orders US nuclear weapons testing to resume now after 33-year pause and US-Iran strike plans: forces ready within 96 hours of Trump order, reports say.
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