United States President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to start nuclear weapons testing “on an equal basis” to China and Russia.
Trump announced this on Thursday, October 30, 2025, minutes before he held a high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
The move came after Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Moscow had successfully tested a nuclear-capable, nuclear-powered underwater drone, in defiance of Washington’s warnings.
“Because of other countries testing programmes, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
Following that announcement, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday that the weapon tests announced by Putin did not constitute a direct test of an atomic weapon.
Both countries observe a de facto moratorium on testing nuclear warheads, though Russia regularly runs military drills involving systems that are capable of carrying such weapons.
The United States has been a signatory since 1996 to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes.
It was not immediately clear whether Trump was referring to testing nuclear warheads, which the United States last did in 1992, or testing weapons systems capable of carrying atomic warheads, AFP reported.
Trump also claimed that the United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country, praising his own efforts to do “a complete update and renovation of existing weapons.”
“Russia is second and China is a distant third, but will be even within five years,” the president stated.
The United States conducted 1,054 nuclear tests between July 16, 1945, when the first test was conducted in New Mexico and 1992, as well as two nuclear attacks on Japan during World War II.
It is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in combat.
The last US nuclear test explosion was in September 1992, with a 20-kiloton underground detonation at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site.
Then-president George H.W. Bush imposed a moratorium on further tests in October 1992 that has been continued by successive administrations.
Nuclear testing was replaced by non-nuclear and subcritical experiments using advanced computer simulations.