Donald Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, widely tipped to play a leading role in a second Trump presidency, has advocated the resumption of nuclear testing, and the possible renewed production of plutonium and weapons-grade uranium.
Arms control experts said O’Brien’s proposals would accelerate the global nuclear arms race and backfire in terms of US security, handing greater advantages to Russia and China.
O’Brien spelled out what he thought a Trump national security policy would look like in an article for the journal Foreign Affairs, entitled The Return of Peace Through Strength.
In the article, O’Brien argued that Trump’s hawkish stance had kept US adversaries in check, and that Biden’s relative weakness had emboldened them. The piece does not mention the progress Iran made in its nuclear programme after Trump pulled out of a 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement with Tehran, or the growth in Chinese and North Korean arsenals during the Trump years.
As part of a policy of signalling strength, O’Brien argued, the US should abandon the moratorium on nuclear testing it has observed since 1992, maintaining it despite the Senate’s refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
“Washington must test new nuclear weapons for reliability and safety in the real world for the first time since 1992 – not just by using computer models,” said O’Brien, who served as national security adviser from 2019 to 2021.
He added: “If China and Russia continue to refuse to engage in good-faith arms-control talks, the United States should also resume production of uranium-235 and plutonium-239, the primary fissile isotopes of nuclear weapons.”
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the US currently has a total inventory of 5,044 warheads, while Russia has 5,580 and China 500. O’Brien argued that the US should maintain “technical and numerical superiority to the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear stockpiles”, suggesting a significant expansion of the current American arsenal.
Such a policy would be in sharp contrast with that of the Biden administration. The current national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told the Arms Control Association (ACA) last year: “The United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them. We’ve been there. We’ve learned that lesson.”
Earlier this month, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, told the ACA that the nuclear weapons powers “must reaffirm [the] moratorium on nuclear testing, and they must accelerate the implementation of the disarmament commitments made under the Nonproliferation Treaty”. He warned that humanity was “on a knife edge” in the face of a potential resumption of a nuclear arms race and advances in artificial intelligence.
Daryl Kimball, the head of the ACA, described O’Brien’s article as “dangerous, counterproductive, Dr Strangelove thinking”.
“No one wins a nuclear arms race, folks,” Kimball said on the X social media platform.
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor and nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California, said a resumption of testing around the world would throw away US advantages that were locked in when the moratorium began more than three decades ago.
“When the test ban happened, the US had done more than 1,000 explosions and had the most advanced computing capabilities in the world, so we had the best data and the best computers, and we were in a position of enormous advantage relative to the Russians, and certainly relative to the Chinese,” Lewis said.
“The Russians had conducted a smaller number of nuclear explosions, and I think that they were not as well-instrumented as ours were … and then the Chinese were way behind,” he added.
“China now has supercomputers comparable to the ones in the US, and so the Chinese laboratories would learn vast amounts about miniaturising nuclear weapons, [and about] making nuclear weapons more reliable, that we already know in the US. Whereas, comparatively, we would learn very, very little.”
Lewis said making more fissile material would be pointless. The US is estimated to have a stockpile of 87.6 tonnes of plutonium and 483 tonnes of highly enriched uranium, enough for tens of thousands more warheads without the need to make any more.
Lewis said the main point of the O’Brien article was to appeal to “an audience of one” – Trump – by putting forward radical ideas that spur outrage from liberals and the arms-control community.
He likened it to the punk rock movement: “Putting a safety pin through your ear is not because you think it looks good or it feels good, but because it outrages the normies.”
