Senior Policy Director John Erath spoke with ABC7 News about President Trump’s comments to restart nuclear testing.
“If you’re talking about the testing of nuclear weapons, there are tests that are conducted called sub-critical tests, where you would make sure everything worked without actually setting off a nuclear explosion. It’s more like testing to make sure that the car ignition system works without turning over the engine,” said John Erath, the senior policy director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
Erath pointed out that all of this testing is overseen by the Department of Energy, not the Pentagon, as Trump said in his social media post. The DOE also certifies annually that America’s nuclear weapons are safe and secure.
As for testing weapon delivery systems, that can be done both in real life and through computer simulation.
“If (the U.S.) were to do a few more, that’s not a huge change, but no doubt, Russia and China would see it or would attempt to portray it in their propaganda as being escalatory and dangerous and all these other things because that’s what they do,” Erath said.
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“The U.S. has all this data nobody else does. So if the U.S. were to start testing nuclear weapons and then others followed suit, they would be gaining ground on the U.S. in terms of scientific and technical knowledge. This would make other people’s nuclear weapons potentially—and I say potentially—just a little bit more dangerous and it might help countries like Iran to develop their own if they should decide to do so,” Erath said. Read more
