CNDP Statement on Trump’s Declaration on Resuming Nuclear Testing
Sukla Sen
CNDP Statement on Trump’s Declaration on Resuming Nuclear Testing
The spectre of a nuclear Armageddon has become a constant companion of humanity since the huge criminal massacre in the closing days of WWII in August 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After a relative pause with the end of the Cold War, this has again started looking more and more real and immediate. The Doomsday Clock -- meant to indicate the immediacy of the final cataclysm -- is now set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. The Clock, by the way, had moved as far back as 17 minutes to midnight in 1991 in the wake of the United States and the Soviet Union signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) and the ending of that earlier Cold War stasis. That was the safest in the entire 78-year history of the Doomsday Clock.
Alarmingly, in recent years The Clock has moved closer to the "Midnight" hour. On February 24, 2022 the day the invasion of Ukraine commenced, Putin, the Russian President in his public address had warned that “anyone who tries to stand in our way” must know that Russia will respond and that the “consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” This would be followed up with repeated, even less veiled, nuclear blackmail threats by him and his deputies. If the US remains the major culprit in its stationing of nuclear weapons outside its territorial borders in a host of allied countries, Russia has now joined it in becoming the second country to station nuclear weapons in another country, namely in Belarus. All the nuclear powers have been developing and testing improved delivery systems, most recently by Russia of its underwater ‘Poseidon’ nuclear drone and of the ‘Burevestnik’ nuclear powered nuclear-armed cruise missile.
However, on October 30, hours prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the U.S. President Donald Trump escalated nuclear dangers even further by posting on social media, “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War [the Pentagon] to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately.” This announcement signals a reversal of decades of United States nuclear policy. The last explosive nuclear weapon test carried out by the United States was back in 1992. Other than North Korea, no country has tested nuclear weapons since the late 1990s, and the 1997 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has been signed by 187 states.
The White House has not yet clarified whether there will at some time soon be a resumption of actual explosive testing or whether this announcement only refers to more general forms of non-explosive testing of its weapons systems. Either way, this announcement cannot but have a deeply de-stabilising effect globally, as the US for almost the whole of the nuclear age, has been the main pace-maker in respect of the nuclear arms race. If the US had earlier ratified the CTBT, China would have followed, Russia would not have withdrawn its ratification in November 2023 and other nuclear powers like India, Pakistan, even North Korea and Israel, would have been under tremendous global pressure to sign and ratify the CTBT. Should the US resume explosive testing (which will take some months to prepare) it will certainly prod its two main competitors, Russia and China to follow suit, and for India and Pakistan, which have not carried out such tests since 1998, to do the same.
With this in mind, the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) India, unequivocally, and in the strongest terms, condemns the latest declaration of intent by the US President. It also calls upon the global public in general, and the civil society organisations fighting for universal nuclear disarmament and peace in particular, to raise their voices against this horrendous contemplated move.