A senior United States official has presented what Washington describes as declassified evidence of a secret Chinese underground nuclear test conducted in 2020, intensifying an already fraught global arms control debate. The disclosure, made at the United Nations-backed Conference on Disarmament in Geneva on Monday, came just weeks after the last remaining nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia expired — a development that has left the world's major nuclear powers operating without formal limits on their arsenals for the first time in decades.
Christopher Yeaw, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Arms Control and Nonproliferation, pointed to a magnitude 2.75 seismic event detected on 22 June 2020 by an international monitoring station in Kazakhstan. Yeaw said the signals originated from China's Lop Nur underground test site in western China, describing it as 'a probable explosion based upon comparisons between historic explosions and earthquakes' and stating that 'the seismic signals were indicative of a single fire explosion, not typical of mining explosions.' Beijing has firmly denied the allegation.
