Testing, Testing . . .

Because the current Republic president doesn’t know how anything works, he sounds like an idiot when he opines on something complicated. The examples are too numerous to recount, but yesterday’s announcement that he was planning to order the Department of War Defense to resume nuclear testing is a real doozie.

The people who designed and tested the first atomic bomb knew what they had done. In a 1965 interview, Robert Oppenheimer said, “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.” In the same interview, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita, saying “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Having removed the proverbial genie from the bottle, nations of the world have spent the next 80 years trying to put it back in by negotiating a variety of international agreements. I won’t go into detail on all of them – you can find them if you’re interested. But in every situation, the United States was focused on limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. This focus was based on the belief that the more nations that possessed this capability, the greater the likelihood that these weapons would be used in an international conflict or in a catastrophic accident. This was a logical determination, but it created a lopsided world where a few nations with nuclear capability worked to deny this capability to other nations.

We saw this dynamic at work earlier in the current administration, when the Republican president authorized an attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, saying many times, “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. We’re not going to allow that.”

Nine nations (that we know of) currently have nuclear weapons – although, with the exception of Russia and the United States, the stockpiles are small:

• United States

• Russia

• China

• France

• United Kingdom

• India

• Pakistan

• Israel (not confirmed by probable since 1967)

• North Korea

The position of the nations that acquired nuclear capability first (the United States and Russia) has always been that it is dangerous for other nations to have this capability and that the world should trust us by either disarming or abandoning plans to develop nuclear weapons. This has always been an uneasy and one-sided agreement, but it has created a durable, if unsteady, peace.

Because it’s a day that ends in “y”, the current Republican president has decided that the United States needs to break this fragile consensus by announcing that he plans to order the resumption of nuclear testing.

Because he doesn’t know (or care) about how anything works, he doesn’t recognize the significance of this or the steps that would normally be taken for such a reversal. Whereas it is true that he has the power to issue the order to resume testing, the process would be complicated. Here’s what should happen:

• Before issuing the order, the President asks the National Security Council in the White House to review the change by gathering information from the Secretaries of Defense, Energy, and State, as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Intelligence agencies.

  • He has denuded the NSC, and the Cabinet secretaries don’t have any balls. He has politicized the intelligence agencies and military command structure, so no one will try to dissuade him from this decision

• The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which are responsible for the nuclear weapons stockpile, would then be tasked with planning, preparing, and executing the test. At the operational level, this would be conducted by the NNSA administrator, a Senate-confirmed individual within DOE.

  • The current NNSA is Brandon Williams, a former one-term congressman who had served in the Navy for five years before working as an investment banker. He also has a farm in upstate New York that focuses on bees, lavender, and truffles. I am not making this up. A quick search of his political views shows him to be a staunch Trump supporter. There is no evidence that he knows anything about nuclear weapons.

• Congress does not have to approve the order directly, but it controls funding and could restrict or authorize funds for nuclear testing. Of course, the current GOP-controlled Congress has ceded all budget authority to the President, so that is not a threat.

• The United States signed (but never ratified) the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), so resuming tests would not technically violate US law, but it would break a global moratorium observed since 1992 and carry major diplomatic consequences.

• Any resumed test would almost certainly occur at the Nevada National Security Site, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The facility notes that it has the ability to conduct an underground nuclear test within 6 to 24 months if ordered by the President. Here’s their website if you want to know more.

I conclude from all of this that the current Republican president continues to have his head up his ass and that this announcement will not result in a nuclear test. The other nuclear nations of the world know this as well. Countries that have decided not to have a nuclear program, or to suspend the program that they had, will be rattled by this announcement. I don’t think they’ll start a nuclear program based on this random announcement by a clearly incompetent POTUS – but I do think they will continue to look elsewhere for a stable global partner. China is looking increasingly attractive.

• NOTE: Something very odd happened while I was doing a little research to write this article. Google redirected me to a general news page every time I used the search term “nuclear weapons.” It let me look up “weapons of mass destruction,” and then I made my way to nuclear weapons through that back door. ChatGPT was able to get information for me when I could not. Odd.