Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Sunday that the Trump-ordered nuclear weapons tests will not involve explosions of any kind.
“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests,” Wright said on Fox News’s The Sunday Briefing. “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions. So you’re testing all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to make sure they deliver the appropriate geometry, and they set up the nuclear explosion.”
“The testing that we’ll be doing is on new systems,” he added. “And again, these will be non-nuclear explosions. These are just developing these sophisticated systems so that our replacement nuclear weapons are even better than the ones they were before. They’re reliable in all circumstances, under all conditions, and they deliver the performance they were designed for.”
TRUMP SAYS HE WANTS TO RESTART NUCLEAR TESTING. HERE’S WHAT THAT MEANS
Days earlier, President Donald Trump announced that he ordered the War Department to resume nuclear tests “on an equal basis” with Russia and China immediately. The command is the first since the United States stopped underground nuclear testing in 1992.
Congress passed a resolution at the time that led to the current moratorium on nuclear testing. Unless a foreign adversary resumed nuclear testing, the U.S. would follow suit.
In a wide-ranging interview that aired Sunday, Trump claimed that Russia, China, North Korea, and Pakistan are secretly testing nuclear weapons without disclosing it to the press.
“We’re an open society,” he told CBS News’s 60 Minutes. “We’re different. We talk about it. We have to talk about it, because otherwise you people are going to report — they don’t have reporters that are going to be writing about it. We do. No, we’re going to test, because they test and others test.”
North Korea appears to be the only country that has tested nuclear weapons this century, with six different tests conducted between 2006 and 2017 until its self-declared moratorium in 2018. However, the moratorium is no longer in effect after Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un announced its end in 2019.
TRUMP CAGEY ABOUT LOOMING VENEZUELA STRIKES, BUT SAYS MADURO’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED
Trump’s order for renewed nuclear testing dropped right before his highly anticipated trade meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea last week. On Monday, China denied that it has been testing nuclear weapons and called on the U.S. to maintain its moratorium. Trump said he does not want the U.S. to fall behind in nuclear power.
“We’re the only country that doesn’t test,” he told 60 Minutes correspondent Norah O’Donnell, “and I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test.”
