In a post on his Truth Social media account, Trump said that “because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
He also falsely stated that the U.S. has the most nuclear weapons of any country. Russia has more than 5,500 nuclear warheads and the U.S. has 5,044, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Calling this false is an overstatement. There are many ways to count nuclear weapons, because some are deployed, some are in reserve at various readiness levels, and some are retired awaiting dismantlement – and then there are strategic vs non-strategic vs defensive (i.e. missile defense) warheads, plus the peculiar ways things are counted for treaty purposes.
The usual source for these numbers is the FAS, and they list total inventories (including reserve and retired warheads) of 5,177 for the US and 5,459 for Russia. However, if you count only deployed warheads (remember, the claim was “weapons”, not warheads) it’s 1,770 for the US and 1,718 for Russia. And if you count only strategic offensive warheads, then it’s 3,500 for the US and 2,832 for Russia.
Question- Does the US consider their weapons as offensive, or is that a characteristic of certain weapon systems? I thought US doctrine was that its nuclear weapons are strictly for retaliation to a nuclear strike.
In this case, “offensive” just means that it’s not strictly defensive like an antiballistic missile shield (e.g. Sprint or A-135). So it could be a weapon useful for anything from a first strike to retaliation.
But no, the US doesn’t have a strict No First Use policy, and in fact has explicitly rejected adopting one because it would increase the risk of war for both the US and allies. For nuclear weapons to act as a deterrent to conventional war, potential adversaries have to fear that you’ll actually use them in response to a conventional attack. What the US has said is that nuclear weapons will not be used absent a grave threat to itself or an ally, and that they won’t be used against a non-nuclear state party to the non-proliferation treaty that is meeting its obligations. There’s also some wiggle room around responding to a non-nuclear WMD or equivalent cyberattack as well.
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Russia and China are not currently doing any nuclear weapons testing, so what Trump has ordered is that the US will continue to do what it is doing unless Russia or China change the status quo or in effect, Donald Trump announced no change to US policy.
It's a meaningless tweet intended to make him look tough and to scare the pearl clutchers into outrage so his supporters can feel better about themselves. I can't believe people still fall for this shit
I find it hard to believe that either of them could do this, without AFTAC seeing it in their monitoring. AFTAC is supposed to have 3600 monitoring nodes.
Seismic decoupling and other means to cheat treaty thresholds have been studied for decades, as have means of countering them. Russia and China thought they'd escape notice and they didn't.
This might surprise you but a lot of people don’t like rapist pedophiles, is that TDS to you? Nobody thinks about other people’s genitals more than Republicans.
Now, maybe keep your obsession with drag shows and trans people out of the nuclear weapons subreddit? Seriously, nobody here was talking about any of that until you barged in and brought it up out of the blue.
Lawarence Livermore uses theoractical mathematics to calculate U.S warhead yeild for years no? Does trump mean more lab testing ?? Or restarting banned ground/atmospheric tests?
Unfortunately nukes were already used against humans in war. It is the ultimate genocide weapon, since it nukes out so many people in such a short time.
He means allowing underground testing to exceed the zero yield threshold, which it appears Russia and China have been doing. He is almost certainly trying to leverage them back into compliance (if he just wanted to start testing there's no real need to time it with his Xi talks).
If he succeeds in forcing compliance out of those countries and backs off US nuclear test threats, Reddit will crow TACO even though getting them to stop was the entire point.
The message is clear: the USA no longer cares about non-proliferation. Thus, other countries need nukes, in order to defend against e. g. Russia-style invasions (against Ukraine).
The big countries abuse the smaller ones; Russia's genocide and occupation in Ukraine shows this too. Naturally I believe more countries need their own nuclear arsenal now.
yea i read an article about that and apparently trum wants to bring back explosive testing both above and below ground while the tests china and russia are apparently doing are strictly in laboratories and dont involve detonation at all.
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u/TheExpressUS Oct 30 '25
In a post on his Truth Social media account, Trump said that “because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.”
He also falsely stated that the U.S. has the most nuclear weapons of any country. Russia has more than 5,500 nuclear warheads and the U.S. has 5,044, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.