So let's see we've allowed all the arms control treaties to lapse, every single major power is investing more in armaments including nuclear delivery systems.
There is a huge active conflict in Ukraine, right in Europe, the Middle East and many other places like Africa. Many more conflicts are brewing like in Latin America, China, India/Pakistan etc.
There should be alarm bells going off. People aren't aware of just how massive and devastating this threat is.
In the 1980s there were huge protests about jucelar weapons that actually resulted in detente and a relaxation of tensions.
Right now tensions and conflicts are rising. Many people think the threat of nuclear weapons went away after the cold war. They never did.
Where are the peace movements? There has to be popular pressure to institute arms control, make peace and ultimately dismantle these nuclear weapons.
The Obama administration negotiated a number of arms control agreements with various nations (including Russia), and won a Peace prize before they even had anything signed.
Other nations are subject to the penalties of the NTBT.
I hope that we all hope that fusion research will displace hazardous waste in energy production.
Peace movements are sponsored by lots of people in lots of nations.
Nixon, for example, worked to smear the pro-Peace antiwar folks as drug user hippies who couldn't figure out free booze at presidential parties who thus deserved to be incarcerated (without conjugal visits, rights over their bodies and their health, library books, or the right to vote) and marginalized.
People voted to cancel saboteurially-wasteful Reagan-Bush cold war star wars bs and invested in free trade and Peace.
The US is the only NATO member state that claims immunity for War Crimes before the ICC International Criminal Court.
The US just bullied other NATO nations into committing to spending 5% of GDP on defense spending by ~~2030~~ 2035 IIRC. Defense ETFs are up since this administration took office in January, and AI datacenter and AI spending are up, but we are now otherwise lacking in economic growth and we've stopped creating new jobs.
All nations suffer the opportunity costs of war; things we could have paid for instead like healthcare, infrastructure, and education will be underfunded due to zero-sum allocation of the proceeds in the coffer to fights that don't net Peaceful returns.
1. People feel "we won the cold war, so the threat of nuclear war is past". I do not think they are entirely wrong (the risk is still much lower) but its complacent to ignore it. I think it is worsened by people clinging to "end of history" theory.
2. Campaigning against nuclear weapons was far easier when the west was winning the cold war and dominated the world economy.
3. People who are worried about existential threats as now focused on climate change. People seem to be able to worry about only one big threat at a time. There are a number of others (space weather is another, pandemics were until we got a rude awakening) that get ignored.
They also look for a new big threat when necessary, to ensure they never run out of threats. I read of "the problem of overpopulation, the gravest of all social problems of our time," in a book written in 1977.
The peace movements of the 60s/70s/80s grew up "in the shadow of the mushroom cloud" [1] not only aware of their legacy from WW2, but it was constantly drilled into them that there might be a nuclear attack against them at any second of any day. That threat hasn't existed since 1991. That same generation was also very cognizant of nuclear disaster, as both the Three Mile Island & Chernoybl disasters had just happened. So, they weren't only well aware of what the steaks were, it was figuratively drilled into them from childhood.
I'm sure most people now don't even consider a realistic concern, but just more posturing by two authoratative world leaders. In Putin's case, I'd be mostly inclined to agree with that position, considering he's in a stalemate in Ukraine and has basically reached his "wunderwaffe" stage of the war, where he has essentially nothing left to use to fight an entrenched war with and the only way he sees his position to get anything out with through any sort of diplomacy is via fear. Presumably, he knows it's not a tactic that could ever work. Perhaps it's more for his domestic audience than anything else.
I agree. If 5-7 million person No Kings protests are ignorable blips, and the House of Representatives is only technically in session, what's left, legally?
You can't vote away the people behind the curtains and the kingmakers. Quoting Sir Humphrey Applyby:
"British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the Opera, Radio Three, the countryside, the law, the universities ... both of them."
You only vote for which lunatic to run the asylum. And I agree that there are differences among the lunatics, but what about the people who run the asylum?
If you are talking about voting in the US than you haven't been following all the efforts to manipulate voting in the US. Turns out the party in power has all they tools they need to make sure that the people who don't like them can't vote.
It is amazing that people only now start talking about this. You'd think that fighting Russia "indirectly" and launching drones and missiles at Moscow would have caused concern up to 3 years ago.
>Where are the peace movements? There has to be popular pressure to institute arms control, make peace and ultimately dismantle these nuclear weapons.
The current peace movement likes nuclear bombs. Which is odd, the old peace movement didnt, but it has been extremely effective difference.
But this distinction has essentially made nobody acknowledge them as a peace movement. Which is crazy, we finally have a peace movement that's successful and they dont get credit.
A lot of the "peace movements" of the past were financially and ideologically supported by the USSR and Russia [1].
There's nothing bad per se to say against pacifism, to the contrary - but the public image of pacifist movements these days has been heavily tarnished by both the obvious Russia-apologetism regarding the Ukraine war [2] and outright glorification of the horrors done by Hamas on Oct 7th.
So, 80 years of occupation, displacement, and killings didn't tarnish them, nor 2 years of bombing civillians enclosed in a walled off plot of land, with 100,000 dead and genocide - but a single day attack where most people just died from friendly fire under a "allow no hostages" doctrine did?
This is some fine astroturfing. They don’t exist anymore because they were commie-funded and also they exist and are cheering for Hamas to kill Israelis. Yes, peace movements are famous for that.
That article has no real arguments for the bias. And if you are trying to make a point, at least to to cite a somewhat neutral source, Elliott Abrams is very pro-Israel.
You could also argue that for such as small country Israel has managed disproportionate amounts of suffering and should be treated thereafter. I'm so sick of people taking the Israeli side as if they are some innocent nation being harassed by Hamas. They are ruthlessly killing Palestinians and the world is mostly acting as if this is a proper response to a single incident killing just a fraction of people.
What Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was terrible, what Israel has done since then is way way way way worse, not even comparable.
And going back in history it looks the same.
AI and HRW is taking a stance against these terrible crimes, while the rest of the world is cheering on.
> What Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was terrible, what Israel has done since then is way way way way worse, not even comparable.
Legally, Israel would have had the right to wipe Palestine off the map as a response to this factual declaration of war until Hamas declares surrender.
I wonder if he got confused between Russia testing a nuclear powered missile and people detonating nuclear warheads. Both could be called nuclear testing. It wouldn't surprise me if there was that sort of mix up.
The statement lacked any detail. It's just attention whoring.
The US is conducting nuclear tests periodically just like other nuclear powers. Subcritical nuclear testing is allowed.
The last one was in 2024 https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsa-completes-subcriti... "NNSA successfully executed a subcritical experiment in the PULSE facility at the Nevada National Security Site. The experiment was executed in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."
There's large practical and psychological differences between subcritical experiments in labs, and detonating megaton-sized nuclear weapons in underground tests. (At least I hope it's still underground; with this leadership, anything is possible).
The US hasn't detonated a nuclear weapon since 1992. You can call the distinction a technicality if you like, but it doesn't seem like one to me.
Subcritical experiments are done in underground test sites. US does them 1,000 feet underground inside boreholes in Nevada test site because the explosion releases plutonium. Hiroshima has a Peace "Watch" Tower where they show number of days since last nuclear experiment and they count subcritical tests also.
There is psychological effect, but it's not that important. More important is keeping nuclear test ban in effect. If the US does test, Russia and China will follow.
You may be missing the forest for the trees; the worrying aspect is not about whether subcritical tests have taken place in controlled environments and been carried out by skilled and talented individuals. What makes everyone nervous is that a tyrannical equine [0] and its ponies are champing at the bit to make use of nuclear weapons as a way to pressure detracting countries that are resistant to fascism and to control the world.
What statement is attention whoring? The statements made by the President himself?
The article you linked says this:
> This experiment performed as predicted; consistent with the self-imposed moratorium on nuclear explosive testing that the United States has held since 1992, it did not form a self-sustaining, supercritical chain reaction.
And yet, in the BBC article, Trump is said to have said:
> President Donald Trump has called on US military leaders to resume testing
Pretty obvious he doesn't mean "resume 2024 testing". He also said this:
> "With others doing testing, I think it's appropriate that we do also,"
Which would conflict with resuming the testing that was done in 2024 (if it ever stopped).
> Trump's announcement did not include details of how the tests would occur
Again, if it was what was happening in 2024, what new details would need to be added?
He has been obsessed with using nuclear weapons since he took office 2016. He even proposed nuking a hurricane.
Who is attention whore and bullshitter. For any other president statements equal policy, that's not so with Trump.
The statement is so vague that it does not indicate out of ordinary nuclear testing. The statement was made in TruthSocial. There is no presidendtial action (proclamation, memorandum, or executive order.) He might be just talking shit.
> Q: What prompted you to announce you're resuming nuclear testing right before the meeting with Xi?
> TRUMP: They seem to all be nuclear testing. We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don't do testing. We halted it many years ago, but w/ others doing testing I think it's appropriate we do also
I think he's pretty explicitly saying that he wants to start doing testing we aren't currently doing.
This follows in the wake of some fast-moving developments in the nuclear-war field. If you haven't been following it: on the one hand, the US leadership is championing a trillion-dollar space-based missile defense for, quote, "forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland"—i.e. upending "Mutually Assured Destruction"[0,1]. In response (not an immediate response—this has been going back-and-forth since the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002), Russia just days ago test-flew a *nuclear-powered* subsonic cruise missile for 14,000 kilometers[2,3]. That machine's intended for delivering nuclear weapons to the US, in a way that putatively sidesteps the current ideas for missile defenses.
One of the best benefits of the current no live nuclear testing treaties / environment, was that the United States was one of a few countries that had done extensive live tests early on.
The United States is able to sit on its arsenal and data, and with extensive research and simulation validate to a high degree of accuracy that "hey our bombs still work".
Most countries do not have the data/technical expertise/resources to be able to validate with just simulation. But since no-one else is doing live tests, they do not do live tests either.
How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests.
> How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests
My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
Furthermore the fact that using of nuclear weapons has extremely low probability of happening is giving a massive space for corruption. Why maintain what you are not going to use? They managed to siphon money from maintenance of armored equipment, why not ICBMs?
We can get to the staggering reality like Russians have less than 100 working nukes and they themselves may not even know which one are those from those 5500
>My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
US spend: 57 billion USD; US GDP: 29,000 billion. US spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.19%
Russia spend: 8 billion USD; Russia GDP: 2173 billion. Russia spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.36%
France spend: 6 billion USD; France GDP: 3174 billion. French spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.18%.
That's why I put as % of GDP. Russian nukes cost rubles, not USD. The numbers suggest pretty conclusively that the Russian arsenal of 5500 is maintained about as well as the US arsenal of like 5300.
Your "staggering reality" of 100 working missiles is completely delusional.
Again, Russia has much smaller economy than USA. What are you searching for is PPP And no amount of PPP will help you to have 5500 warheads on 8 Billion budget vs 200 warheads on 6 Billion budget.
With your logic Kongo should be able to afford 5500 nuclear warheads just by spending 0.4% pf GDP. That's not possible is it?
I think there is a degree of trade off in this, yes a nuclear scientist/engineer/technician in Russia or China is cheaper than in the USA. But also, the people with those kind of skills (or those technically competent enough to do a good job, are going to be expensive no matter what.)
At some level when people have enough technical skill to do these jobs well, they also have enough technical skill to leave the country and go elsewhere and do something else for better quality of life.
Like GDP per capita in china is much lower than the USA, I bet that their nuclear program engineers are getting paid at least ~80k range, which while less than the equivalent engineer in the USA is paid, is not the same level as what a direct PPP comparison would give.
There are a lot of software engineers in UK who made $50k or less who could have presumably moved to the US a make a lot more but never did. Lots of government employees making much less than they could. Patriotism, wanting to live in their own country, wanting to work on interesting things, etc.
Or, they do have a 100 working ICBMs and they do actually know which ones are those. The rest of the warheads in storage are not really maintained. Russians are corrupt as hell, but they are not actually incompetent when they need to have something working.
Now, earnest question: what happens to the nuclear engine fuel at end of flight? While it certainly won't become critical it's likely the only part it stops being is "engine fuel".
(Of course the question above is irrelevant the moment the missile is fitted with a nuclear warhead)
Yup. The last test from Russia was in 1990. China was in 1996. China was much less advanced than now compared to the US (proportionally) and Russia/USSR was into a crisis and didn't even exist as a country (Russia) back then. The US is just doing another gift to Russia and China.
For the Russians it would be a mistake to rely on the unreliability or inferiority of their weapons - they historically are very adept at addressing those with sheer numbers.
Nuclear non-proliferation only really works when no one feels the need for nuclear weapons in the first place. As soon as countries start feeling threatened or distrust each other, the whole idea falls apart. It’s easy to agree on disarmament when everyone feels safe, but when fear enters the picture, every nation starts looking for its own button to press.
Sadly, the world learned this lesson the hard way from Ukraine’s example: a country that gave up its nuclear arsenal for security guarantees, only to be invaded by the very power that signed them.
A House of Dynamite [2]. Everyone is looking to have more dynamite than the other next room, while living inside the house. All of this happening while the world gets more and more divisive. It's insanity. Are 12,000 nukes safer than zero? [1].
Since the Trump admin and the director had an exchange of views through the media recently regarding the movie, I wouldn't be surprised if the timing of the announcement was partially motivated by reality show Trump's TV instincts.
This is likely a pretty big win for China/Russia if he follows through with it - USA has advanced nuclear weapon simulation capabilities which almost certainly outstrip theirs, so has a reduced need to conduct non sub-critical tests.
It doesn't really matter how advanced your supercomputing infrastructure is .... the simulation is as good as the input and data from actual tests.
The big question is whether China is confident enough with the data they have from 47 tests.
Any non-subcritical testing is a gift to China as they are severely lagging behind US on number of tests conducted and therefore amount of data collected about warhead design.
Resumption of tests would add fresh data to verify new warhead designs over the decades since the last test. US would have a lesser need for new data given the amount of testing done during the cold war.
If US does conduct a nuclear test I bet a whole slew of test from China would come very shortly after that. Work has already been noticed in recent years in the test tunnel.
It's also pretty bad since the USA inarguably benefits from non-proliferation much more than either China or Russia. The whole point of nuclear is that it bypasses conventional capabilities, and USA has the best conventional capabilities, so it loses the most in terms of relative power.
AI and technological advancement ahould be the focus rather then nuclear positioning. It is surprising to hear how badly the nuclear assets are managed though, so maybe its some kond of inprovement. They used the password 0000 for the launch coes for like 30 years until the 90's or later, can you imagine. that is a completely horrendous level of security for weapons that will cause the end of the human species on the entire planet. As AI becomes the super focus, hopefully nuclear weapons will less and less of a choice.
I really recommend watching A House Of Dynamite, the new movie by Kathryn Bigelow, which provides a highly realistic view of just how insane the entire nuclear system is. All of us live in a constant state of enormous danger: we are just 20 minutes away from apocalypse at all times. Even if you believe that nuclear deterrence is what prevents great power conflict, there is no avoiding the fact that it would take just one mistake or one technical failure or one mentally ill submarine commander to end civilization. We have to fix this, not make it worse!
Not one: several mistakes, or several failures, or several people in a submarine. Those systems all have multiple stages that require several validation steps to work, we do that for way less sensitive processes.
Nonetheless, yes, we're still on the brink of something gloomy. The movie is quite good, and would massively gain from spinoffs showing what happens in realtime in other countries too.
Also: how confident are we in the safeguards that, say, North Korea or Pakistan have in place? And how confident are we in the systems that tell us, and our adversaries, that an attack is taking place?
“His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that would have likely resulted in a large-scale nuclear war.”
No matter where you live, the American presidency will find a way to make things more shit for you. With everything going on in the world, really what we needed is more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing, isn't it? Thanks Putin, thanks Trump, and all their enablers.
This is confusing, the Russian and Chinese 'nuclear weapons tests' mentioned in the article didn't involve testing nuclear weapons, but Trump wants to test nuclear weapons in response? Did I read that right?
I'm confused about that as well. I don't see any reason for the US to not test the delivery mechanisms, i.e. the ICBM and missiles. The ICBMs are being replaced, so it would make sense to test those, but the Tomahawks and Trident missiles are tested frequently, the last Trident II being tested in September of this year.
That's certainly a plausible reading, but in truth it is very uncertain what he means.
The leading guess I've seen is that he's "striking back" after Putin announced successful tests of new delivery platforms for nuclear weapons (which Russia developed because Bush abandoned the ABM treaty for the lols).
Don't try to find the magic truth in Trump's rants: he is an ignorant, dementia-addled old man whose self-perception as a leader is as a strongman in an imagined late 1970s/1980s era because he's always been stuck in that era.
Pretending it's all a crazy-man act with hidden strategy a) requires that he isn't mentally declining (when he obviously is and his doctors think so and are trying to tell us) and b) would require that this ignorant man has good advisors where he very clearly does not.
One of the greatest stories from the first Trump presidency is him suggesting a "tenfold" increase in the United States nuclear arsenal, and Rex Tillerson subsequently calling him a "fucking moron".
It also works the other way. A nuclear war between two countries nowhere near the US and that doesn't draw in any other nuclear powers could still have pretty annoying effects in the US.
Here's a paper [1] and an article [2] based on that paper that looked at what a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do to the rest of the world.
The scenario they look it is each firing 100 nukes the size of the bomb used at Hiroshima at the other, aimed at major population centers.
Here's the abstract from the paper:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
BTW, both India and Pakistan rely on the glaciers in the Himalayas for freshwater. The glaciers in effect act as a natural reservoir system.
Something like 70% of Pakistan depends on that system, and a similar percent for northern India. Overall in Southeast Asia about 1.9 billion people depend on those glaciers.
As global warming reduces those glaciers it is not a stretch to imagine disputes over allocation of the remaining water getting heated enough for war to break out. I've read that if we let it get to 3℃ above pre-industrial levels we lose about 75% of those glaciers.
This is Trump. He's not going to war with Russia but if he gets out of the wrong side of his bed and reads the wrong social media post he might have to get talked out of nuking Portland
... but with China instead. The trouble with this guy is, you can't be sure if what he spouts from his mouth is him being actually serious, him just parroting whatever the last person to talk to him said (seems to be a common trope regarding anything Ukraine) or if he's just out of his mind and gone off script, off rails. And on top of that you got stuff like the sinking of the "Venezuelan drug boats" that would be seen as and dealt with as a declaration of war if the aggressor weren't the USA.
All it takes for stuff to go Seriously Damn Wrong is one person on the other side taking his verbal diarrhoea seriously and literally and acting accordingly.
We have to thank that this guy doesn't understand software otherwise he'd have banned internet services offered to other countries or used it as barganing tool.
America is made up of the millions of hard working men and women , but the excessive patriotism is concentrating too much power in the hands of the executives.
Reaching leves such as Saudi and UAE without all the free things that their citizens get because of the oil
Just yesterday:
President Vladimir Putin says Russia has conducted a successful test of a new atomic-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone, declaring that the new weapon can’t be intercepted
Asking to take down a fence when you have no idea why it was put up is not smart. Neither is asking someone to “stop” Trump (and making not even a token effort to exclude violent or criminal ways of achieving that goal) based on a headline you skimmed for < 5 seconds.
Nuclear weapon testing and development is very much needed. Nuclear weapon technologies have been stymied for decades. Humanity is under a possible threat from some sort of Non Human Intelligence whose drones and craft constitute most UAP sightings. All of this is kept secret for decades, and nuclear weapons are by far Humanity's most effective defense as we study these beings and craft.
The only testing we need to do is on nuclear adjacent software, some was recently hacked through a sharepoint vulnerability.
So let's see we've allowed all the arms control treaties to lapse, every single major power is investing more in armaments including nuclear delivery systems.
There is a huge active conflict in Ukraine, right in Europe, the Middle East and many other places like Africa. Many more conflicts are brewing like in Latin America, China, India/Pakistan etc.
There should be alarm bells going off. People aren't aware of just how massive and devastating this threat is.
In the 1980s there were huge protests about jucelar weapons that actually resulted in detente and a relaxation of tensions.
Right now tensions and conflicts are rising. Many people think the threat of nuclear weapons went away after the cold war. They never did.
Where are the peace movements? There has to be popular pressure to institute arms control, make peace and ultimately dismantle these nuclear weapons.
The Obama administration negotiated a number of arms control agreements with various nations (including Russia), and won a Peace prize before they even had anything signed.
Other nations are subject to the penalties of the NTBT.
I hope that we all hope that fusion research will displace hazardous waste in energy production.
Peace movements are sponsored by lots of people in lots of nations.
Nixon, for example, worked to smear the pro-Peace antiwar folks as drug user hippies who couldn't figure out free booze at presidential parties who thus deserved to be incarcerated (without conjugal visits, rights over their bodies and their health, library books, or the right to vote) and marginalized.
People voted to cancel saboteurially-wasteful Reagan-Bush cold war star wars bs and invested in free trade and Peace.
The US is the only NATO member state that claims immunity for War Crimes before the ICC International Criminal Court.
The US just bullied other NATO nations into committing to spending 5% of GDP on defense spending by ~~2030~~ 2035 IIRC. Defense ETFs are up since this administration took office in January, and AI datacenter and AI spending are up, but we are now otherwise lacking in economic growth and we've stopped creating new jobs.
All nations suffer the opportunity costs of war; things we could have paid for instead like healthcare, infrastructure, and education will be underfunded due to zero-sum allocation of the proceeds in the coffer to fights that don't net Peaceful returns.
Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush. (I wasn't GW Bush, either, but somehow they overlooked me.)
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I think there are several things happening here.
1. People feel "we won the cold war, so the threat of nuclear war is past". I do not think they are entirely wrong (the risk is still much lower) but its complacent to ignore it. I think it is worsened by people clinging to "end of history" theory.
2. Campaigning against nuclear weapons was far easier when the west was winning the cold war and dominated the world economy.
3. People who are worried about existential threats as now focused on climate change. People seem to be able to worry about only one big threat at a time. There are a number of others (space weather is another, pandemics were until we got a rude awakening) that get ignored.
They also look for a new big threat when necessary, to ensure they never run out of threats. I read of "the problem of overpopulation, the gravest of all social problems of our time," in a book written in 1977.
The peace movements of the 60s/70s/80s grew up "in the shadow of the mushroom cloud" [1] not only aware of their legacy from WW2, but it was constantly drilled into them that there might be a nuclear attack against them at any second of any day. That threat hasn't existed since 1991. That same generation was also very cognizant of nuclear disaster, as both the Three Mile Island & Chernoybl disasters had just happened. So, they weren't only well aware of what the steaks were, it was figuratively drilled into them from childhood.
I'm sure most people now don't even consider a realistic concern, but just more posturing by two authoratative world leaders. In Putin's case, I'd be mostly inclined to agree with that position, considering he's in a stalemate in Ukraine and has basically reached his "wunderwaffe" stage of the war, where he has essentially nothing left to use to fight an entrenched war with and the only way he sees his position to get anything out with through any sort of diplomacy is via fear. Presumably, he knows it's not a tactic that could ever work. Perhaps it's more for his domestic audience than anything else.
[1] Hammer to Fall by Queen https://genius.com/Queen-hammer-to-fall-lyrics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderwaffe?wprov=sfla1
I think people are aware but we are powerless.
We are not powerless. History (even very recent history) makes this point abundantly clear.
"A common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." -- Alice Walker
I agree. If 5-7 million person No Kings protests are ignorable blips, and the House of Representatives is only technically in session, what's left, legally?
Voting.
You can't vote away the people behind the curtains and the kingmakers. Quoting Sir Humphrey Applyby:
"British democracy recognises that you need a system to protect the important things of life, and keep them out of the hands of the barbarians. Things like the Opera, Radio Three, the countryside, the law, the universities ... both of them."
You only vote for which lunatic to run the asylum. And I agree that there are differences among the lunatics, but what about the people who run the asylum?
If you are talking about voting in the US than you haven't been following all the efforts to manipulate voting in the US. Turns out the party in power has all they tools they need to make sure that the people who don't like them can't vote.
It is amazing that people only now start talking about this. You'd think that fighting Russia "indirectly" and launching drones and missiles at Moscow would have caused concern up to 3 years ago.
>Where are the peace movements? There has to be popular pressure to institute arms control, make peace and ultimately dismantle these nuclear weapons.
The current peace movement likes nuclear bombs. Which is odd, the old peace movement didnt, but it has been extremely effective difference.
But this distinction has essentially made nobody acknowledge them as a peace movement. Which is crazy, we finally have a peace movement that's successful and they dont get credit.
I'm confused. Which peace movement are you talking about?
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> Where are the peace movements?
A lot of the "peace movements" of the past were financially and ideologically supported by the USSR and Russia [1].
There's nothing bad per se to say against pacifism, to the contrary - but the public image of pacifist movements these days has been heavily tarnished by both the obvious Russia-apologetism regarding the Ukraine war [2] and outright glorification of the horrors done by Hamas on Oct 7th.
[1] https://www.swr.de/swrkultur/wissen/wie-russische-einflussne...
[2] https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/zuviel-verstaendnis-fue...
So, 80 years of occupation, displacement, and killings didn't tarnish them, nor 2 years of bombing civillians enclosed in a walled off plot of land, with 100,000 dead and genocide - but a single day attack where most people just died from friendly fire under a "allow no hostages" doctrine did?
This is some fine astroturfing. They don’t exist anymore because they were commie-funded and also they exist and are cheering for Hamas to kill Israelis. Yes, peace movements are famous for that.
> They don’t exist anymore because they were commie-funded
I don't claim they don't exist any more, I claim they lost political relevance.
> and also they exist and are cheering for Hamas to kill Israelis
AI and HRW have a serious anti-Israel bias [1].
[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-amnesty-international-suspended...
That article has no real arguments for the bias. And if you are trying to make a point, at least to to cite a somewhat neutral source, Elliott Abrams is very pro-Israel.
You could also argue that for such as small country Israel has managed disproportionate amounts of suffering and should be treated thereafter. I'm so sick of people taking the Israeli side as if they are some innocent nation being harassed by Hamas. They are ruthlessly killing Palestinians and the world is mostly acting as if this is a proper response to a single incident killing just a fraction of people. What Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was terrible, what Israel has done since then is way way way way worse, not even comparable. And going back in history it looks the same. AI and HRW is taking a stance against these terrible crimes, while the rest of the world is cheering on.
> What Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was terrible, what Israel has done since then is way way way way worse, not even comparable.
Legally, Israel would have had the right to wipe Palestine off the map as a response to this factual declaration of war until Hamas declares surrender.
According to what law exactly?
As per the very unbiased CIA influence launderers at the CFR.
I wonder if he got confused between Russia testing a nuclear powered missile and people detonating nuclear warheads. Both could be called nuclear testing. It wouldn't surprise me if there was that sort of mix up.
The statement lacked any detail. It's just attention whoring.
The US is conducting nuclear tests periodically just like other nuclear powers. Subcritical nuclear testing is allowed. The last one was in 2024 https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/articles/nnsa-completes-subcriti... "NNSA successfully executed a subcritical experiment in the PULSE facility at the Nevada National Security Site. The experiment was executed in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory."
There's large practical and psychological differences between subcritical experiments in labs, and detonating megaton-sized nuclear weapons in underground tests. (At least I hope it's still underground; with this leadership, anything is possible).
The US hasn't detonated a nuclear weapon since 1992. You can call the distinction a technicality if you like, but it doesn't seem like one to me.
Subcritical experiments are done in underground test sites. US does them 1,000 feet underground inside boreholes in Nevada test site because the explosion releases plutonium. Hiroshima has a Peace "Watch" Tower where they show number of days since last nuclear experiment and they count subcritical tests also.
There is psychological effect, but it's not that important. More important is keeping nuclear test ban in effect. If the US does test, Russia and China will follow.
> The statement lacked any detail. It's just attention whoring
Everything is now. That’s what you get when you build a mind rape device that explicitly rewards attention whoring an other antisocial behavior.
You may be missing the forest for the trees; the worrying aspect is not about whether subcritical tests have taken place in controlled environments and been carried out by skilled and talented individuals. What makes everyone nervous is that a tyrannical equine [0] and its ponies are champing at the bit to make use of nuclear weapons as a way to pressure detracting countries that are resistant to fascism and to control the world.
[0]: https://youtu.be/JhkZMxgPxXU
What statement is attention whoring? The statements made by the President himself?
The article you linked says this:
> This experiment performed as predicted; consistent with the self-imposed moratorium on nuclear explosive testing that the United States has held since 1992, it did not form a self-sustaining, supercritical chain reaction.
And yet, in the BBC article, Trump is said to have said:
> President Donald Trump has called on US military leaders to resume testing
Pretty obvious he doesn't mean "resume 2024 testing". He also said this:
> "With others doing testing, I think it's appropriate that we do also,"
Which would conflict with resuming the testing that was done in 2024 (if it ever stopped).
> Trump's announcement did not include details of how the tests would occur
Again, if it was what was happening in 2024, what new details would need to be added?
He has been obsessed with using nuclear weapons since he took office 2016. He even proposed nuking a hurricane.
> The statements made by the President himself?
Who is attention whore and bullshitter. For any other president statements equal policy, that's not so with Trump.
The statement is so vague that it does not indicate out of ordinary nuclear testing. The statement was made in TruthSocial. There is no presidendtial action (proclamation, memorandum, or executive order.) He might be just talking shit.
> The statement was made in TruthSocial.
And now he's saying it when being asked by reporters.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m4g67chzo226
> Q: What prompted you to announce you're resuming nuclear testing right before the meeting with Xi?
> TRUMP: They seem to all be nuclear testing. We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don't do testing. We halted it many years ago, but w/ others doing testing I think it's appropriate we do also
I think he's pretty explicitly saying that he wants to start doing testing we aren't currently doing.
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This follows in the wake of some fast-moving developments in the nuclear-war field. If you haven't been following it: on the one hand, the US leadership is championing a trillion-dollar space-based missile defense for, quote, "forever ending the missile threat to the American homeland"—i.e. upending "Mutually Assured Destruction"[0,1]. In response (not an immediate response—this has been going back-and-forth since the US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in 2002), Russia just days ago test-flew a *nuclear-powered* subsonic cruise missile for 14,000 kilometers[2,3]. That machine's intended for delivering nuclear weapons to the US, in a way that putatively sidesteps the current ideas for missile defenses.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/m... ("Golden Dome missile defense system could cost over $1 trillion")
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s... ("Golden Dome (missile defense system)")
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/russia-tested-new-nuclea... ("Russia tested new nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile")
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik ("9M730 Burevestnik")
So much for nuclear non-proliferation...
One of the best benefits of the current no live nuclear testing treaties / environment, was that the United States was one of a few countries that had done extensive live tests early on.
The United States is able to sit on its arsenal and data, and with extensive research and simulation validate to a high degree of accuracy that "hey our bombs still work".
Most countries do not have the data/technical expertise/resources to be able to validate with just simulation. But since no-one else is doing live tests, they do not do live tests either.
How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests.
My bet is that it is non-0.
> How much do you want to bet that a subset of the Russian nuclear weapons simply do not work, and that they will only figure this out when they need to 'test' in response to American tests
My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_spending_get_the_facts
Furthermore the fact that using of nuclear weapons has extremely low probability of happening is giving a massive space for corruption. Why maintain what you are not going to use? They managed to siphon money from maintenance of armored equipment, why not ICBMs?
We can get to the staggering reality like Russians have less than 100 working nukes and they themselves may not even know which one are those from those 5500
>My bet is that most of them are in disrepair. Russia spends around 8 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. France spends around 6 Billion USD on nuclear weapons. Difference is that France has something like 200 warheads, while Russia has something like 5500 warheads.
US spend: 57 billion USD; US GDP: 29,000 billion. US spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.19%
Russia spend: 8 billion USD; Russia GDP: 2173 billion. Russia spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.36%
France spend: 6 billion USD; France GDP: 3174 billion. French spend on nukes as % of GDP: 0.18%.
French, Russian and US economies has a little bit different sizes.
That's why I put as % of GDP. Russian nukes cost rubles, not USD. The numbers suggest pretty conclusively that the Russian arsenal of 5500 is maintained about as well as the US arsenal of like 5300.
Your "staggering reality" of 100 working missiles is completely delusional.
Again, Russia has much smaller economy than USA. What are you searching for is PPP And no amount of PPP will help you to have 5500 warheads on 8 Billion budget vs 200 warheads on 6 Billion budget.
With your logic Kongo should be able to afford 5500 nuclear warheads just by spending 0.4% pf GDP. That's not possible is it?
I think there is a degree of trade off in this, yes a nuclear scientist/engineer/technician in Russia or China is cheaper than in the USA. But also, the people with those kind of skills (or those technically competent enough to do a good job, are going to be expensive no matter what.)
At some level when people have enough technical skill to do these jobs well, they also have enough technical skill to leave the country and go elsewhere and do something else for better quality of life.
Like GDP per capita in china is much lower than the USA, I bet that their nuclear program engineers are getting paid at least ~80k range, which while less than the equivalent engineer in the USA is paid, is not the same level as what a direct PPP comparison would give.
There are a lot of software engineers in UK who made $50k or less who could have presumably moved to the US a make a lot more but never did. Lots of government employees making much less than they could. Patriotism, wanting to live in their own country, wanting to work on interesting things, etc.
Shouldn't you compare US with EU?
So you are saying that Tuvalu could maintain a nuclear arsenal for around 260 000 USD.
Or, they do have a 100 working ICBMs and they do actually know which ones are those. The rest of the warheads in storage are not really maintained. Russians are corrupt as hell, but they are not actually incompetent when they need to have something working.
Didn't Russia test a nuclear missile a few days ago?
That was a nuclear engine for a cruise missile, not a nuclear warhead.
Technically correct.
Now, earnest question: what happens to the nuclear engine fuel at end of flight? While it certainly won't become critical it's likely the only part it stops being is "engine fuel".
(Of course the question above is irrelevant the moment the missile is fitted with a nuclear warhead)
Of course this nuclear cruise missile is horribly dangerous with or without a nuclear warhead.
However, testing it says nothing about whether the nuclear warheads still work, which is the nuclear testing in question.
Nuclear missile is effectively a flying scramjet nuclear reactor heating air passing through it via radioactive decay, not a nuke.
Yup. The last test from Russia was in 1990. China was in 1996. China was much less advanced than now compared to the US (proportionally) and Russia/USSR was into a crisis and didn't even exist as a country (Russia) back then. The US is just doing another gift to Russia and China.
> My bet is that it is non-0.
For the Russians it would be a mistake to rely on the unreliability or inferiority of their weapons - they historically are very adept at addressing those with sheer numbers.
That's not wrong, but what would countries that already own nuclear weapons keep from simply producing new ones?
Nuclear non-proliferation only really works when no one feels the need for nuclear weapons in the first place. As soon as countries start feeling threatened or distrust each other, the whole idea falls apart. It’s easy to agree on disarmament when everyone feels safe, but when fear enters the picture, every nation starts looking for its own button to press.
Sadly, the world learned this lesson the hard way from Ukraine’s example: a country that gave up its nuclear arsenal for security guarantees, only to be invaded by the very power that signed them.
'non-proliferation' is about preventing currently non-nuclear countries from obtaining/developing nuclear weapons, it's not about nuclear tests.
A House of Dynamite [2]. Everyone is looking to have more dynamite than the other next room, while living inside the house. All of this happening while the world gets more and more divisive. It's insanity. Are 12,000 nukes safer than zero? [1].
[1] https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/annie-jacobsen/ [2] https://www.netflix.com/title/81744537
Since the Trump admin and the director had an exchange of views through the media recently regarding the movie, I wouldn't be surprised if the timing of the announcement was partially motivated by reality show Trump's TV instincts.
This is likely a pretty big win for China/Russia if he follows through with it - USA has advanced nuclear weapon simulation capabilities which almost certainly outstrip theirs, so has a reduced need to conduct non sub-critical tests.
It doesn't really matter how advanced your supercomputing infrastructure is .... the simulation is as good as the input and data from actual tests.
The big question is whether China is confident enough with the data they have from 47 tests.
Any non-subcritical testing is a gift to China as they are severely lagging behind US on number of tests conducted and therefore amount of data collected about warhead design.
Resumption of tests would add fresh data to verify new warhead designs over the decades since the last test. US would have a lesser need for new data given the amount of testing done during the cold war.
If US does conduct a nuclear test I bet a whole slew of test from China would come very shortly after that. Work has already been noticed in recent years in the test tunnel.
https://asia.nikkei.com/static/vdata/infographics/satellite-...
It's also pretty bad since the USA inarguably benefits from non-proliferation much more than either China or Russia. The whole point of nuclear is that it bypasses conventional capabilities, and USA has the best conventional capabilities, so it loses the most in terms of relative power.
AI and technological advancement ahould be the focus rather then nuclear positioning. It is surprising to hear how badly the nuclear assets are managed though, so maybe its some kond of inprovement. They used the password 0000 for the launch coes for like 30 years until the 90's or later, can you imagine. that is a completely horrendous level of security for weapons that will cause the end of the human species on the entire planet. As AI becomes the super focus, hopefully nuclear weapons will less and less of a choice.
No, the “AI” will just be used to trigger the launch. No more passwords, though. Instead, nuclear hallucinations.
To me the real question is what kind of trust has eroded that Americans stopped electing smart people into office.
nuclear bombs, moon landings wow
it's like the 1960s again, but with old people
I really recommend watching A House Of Dynamite, the new movie by Kathryn Bigelow, which provides a highly realistic view of just how insane the entire nuclear system is. All of us live in a constant state of enormous danger: we are just 20 minutes away from apocalypse at all times. Even if you believe that nuclear deterrence is what prevents great power conflict, there is no avoiding the fact that it would take just one mistake or one technical failure or one mentally ill submarine commander to end civilization. We have to fix this, not make it worse!
Extremely bad movie. Fearmonger porn with good acting.
Spoilers ahead, in case you decide to watch this bleak 2 hour waste of time:
"Oooh, nothing works, ooohh, we're going to die". This should've been a 15 minute YouTube video, not a movie.
Not one: several mistakes, or several failures, or several people in a submarine. Those systems all have multiple stages that require several validation steps to work, we do that for way less sensitive processes.
Nonetheless, yes, we're still on the brink of something gloomy. The movie is quite good, and would massively gain from spinoffs showing what happens in realtime in other countries too.
What about a mentally-ill president?
Ah, good point. Sorry.
Also: how confident are we in the safeguards that, say, North Korea or Pakistan have in place? And how confident are we in the systems that tell us, and our adversaries, that an attack is taking place?
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov :
“His subsequent decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that would have likely resulted in a large-scale nuclear war.”
No matter where you live, the American presidency will find a way to make things more shit for you. With everything going on in the world, really what we needed is more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing, isn't it? Thanks Putin, thanks Trump, and all their enablers.
Just a reminder: Obama and Merkel are real enablers for putin.
Weak response to multiple russian invasions enabled all kind of dictators around the globe.
This is confusing, the Russian and Chinese 'nuclear weapons tests' mentioned in the article didn't involve testing nuclear weapons, but Trump wants to test nuclear weapons in response? Did I read that right?
I'm confused about that as well. I don't see any reason for the US to not test the delivery mechanisms, i.e. the ICBM and missiles. The ICBMs are being replaced, so it would make sense to test those, but the Tomahawks and Trident missiles are tested frequently, the last Trident II being tested in September of this year.
That's certainly a plausible reading, but in truth it is very uncertain what he means.
The leading guess I've seen is that he's "striking back" after Putin announced successful tests of new delivery platforms for nuclear weapons (which Russia developed because Bush abandoned the ABM treaty for the lols).
Don't try to find the magic truth in Trump's rants: he is an ignorant, dementia-addled old man whose self-perception as a leader is as a strongman in an imagined late 1970s/1980s era because he's always been stuck in that era.
Pretending it's all a crazy-man act with hidden strategy a) requires that he isn't mentally declining (when he obviously is and his doctors think so and are trying to tell us) and b) would require that this ignorant man has good advisors where he very clearly does not.
> and b) would require that this ignorant man has good advisors where he very clearly does not.
Well... Project 2025. There are people behind Trump actually pulling the strings in a very dangerous direction!
10/10 this is something Trump saw on some Fox Talkshow. That’s literally how he rolls. See his comments on Portland
> Trump: ‘Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?’
And the carefully crafted intel briefings informed by best in the world intel services just to ensure he’s operating on good info? He doesn’t bother:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/09/trump-intelligence-...
Dude shouldn’t be in charge of anything let alone nukes
https://archive.ph/icmoF
Really working hard towards that Nobel peace prize.
One of the greatest stories from the first Trump presidency is him suggesting a "tenfold" increase in the United States nuclear arsenal, and Rex Tillerson subsequently calling him a "fucking moron".
What the actual #*!@...
Well, anybody have any modern simulation models for fallout distribution after a nuclear war between the USA and Russia?
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ is a "fun" resource for checking how screwed you are if the enemy bombs your friendly neighborhood city
Thankfully, being almost-central London, anything more than about 100kt means I'm immediately toasted.
Can they not just shoot down the bomb before it actually lands?
I'll place a bet that the fallout from that conflict will extend to the zone known as 'everywhere'
Southern hemisphere might be ok.
It also works the other way. A nuclear war between two countries nowhere near the US and that doesn't draw in any other nuclear powers could still have pretty annoying effects in the US.
Here's a paper [1] and an article [2] based on that paper that looked at what a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do to the rest of the world.
The scenario they look it is each firing 100 nukes the size of the bomb used at Hiroshima at the other, aimed at major population centers.
Here's the abstract from the paper:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
BTW, both India and Pakistan rely on the glaciers in the Himalayas for freshwater. The glaciers in effect act as a natural reservoir system.
Something like 70% of Pakistan depends on that system, and a similar percent for northern India. Overall in Southeast Asia about 1.9 billion people depend on those glaciers.
As global warming reduces those glaciers it is not a stretch to imagine disputes over allocation of the remaining water getting heated enough for war to break out. I've read that if we let it get to 3℃ above pre-industrial levels we lose about 75% of those glaciers.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919049117
[2] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...
This is Trump. He's not going to war with Russia but if he gets out of the wrong side of his bed and reads the wrong social media post he might have to get talked out of nuking Portland
> He's not going to war with Russia
... but with China instead. The trouble with this guy is, you can't be sure if what he spouts from his mouth is him being actually serious, him just parroting whatever the last person to talk to him said (seems to be a common trope regarding anything Ukraine) or if he's just out of his mind and gone off script, off rails. And on top of that you got stuff like the sinking of the "Venezuelan drug boats" that would be seen as and dealt with as a declaration of war if the aggressor weren't the USA.
All it takes for stuff to go Seriously Damn Wrong is one person on the other side taking his verbal diarrhoea seriously and literally and acting accordingly.
Confucius say, smaller man rattle saber more loudly.
Ah, casual racism implying Confucius spoke English with stereotypical Chinese style and grammatical errors...
2.5 Millennia ago no one spoke English...
Sorry to disappoint, but you are incorrect, my good bot.
America is going rogue.
We have to thank that this guy doesn't understand software otherwise he'd have banned internet services offered to other countries or used it as barganing tool.
America is made up of the millions of hard working men and women , but the excessive patriotism is concentrating too much power in the hands of the executives.
Reaching leves such as Saudi and UAE without all the free things that their citizens get because of the oil
Just yesterday: President Vladimir Putin says Russia has conducted a successful test of a new atomic-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone, declaring that the new weapon can’t be intercepted
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/putin-russias...
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this is cover for Russia, Trump+Putin want to scare the world into a Ukraine war settlement
Russia will do what Russia was always going to do: performatively detonate a nuclear weapon over the northern North Sea.
This madman needs to be stopped
Asking to take down a fence when you have no idea why it was put up is not smart. Neither is asking someone to “stop” Trump (and making not even a token effort to exclude violent or criminal ways of achieving that goal) based on a headline you skimmed for < 5 seconds.
Nuclear weapon testing and development is very much needed. Nuclear weapon technologies have been stymied for decades. Humanity is under a possible threat from some sort of Non Human Intelligence whose drones and craft constitute most UAP sightings. All of this is kept secret for decades, and nuclear weapons are by far Humanity's most effective defense as we study these beings and craft.
Your nickname is apt.