NEW YORK, July 30. /TASS/. The US will lose in a nuclear race if it resumes nuclear testing because Russia and China will quickly catch up to it, Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said in an opinion column for Foreign Affairs magazine.
"Make no mistake: the resumption of nuclear weapons testing would be bad for the United States," he cautioned. According to the expert, people who might serve in Washington’s new administration should Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump get re-elected, "are once again floating the unhelpful idea of the United States resuming nuclear weapons testing."
Lewis mentioned a recent Foreign Affairs essay by Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser from 2019 to 2021, who insists that Washington must test new nuclear weapons "in the real world" instead of "using computer models" in order "to maintain technical and numerical superiority" over Russia and China’s nuclear arsenals.
Such a development may lead to Moscow and Beijing also resuming nuclear testing, Lewis thinks. According to him, Russia and China will benefit from the situation much more than the US.
"Moreover, new or emerging nuclear weapons states—say, Iran or Saudi Arabia—would feel no constraints against carrying out explosion tests. The result would be that the United States’ nuclear-armed foes would be even more capable," the expert added.
The US stopped nuclear testing in 1992. The decision was made by the George Bush S. administration. In 1996, 187 countries signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), however, it has never taken effect because it was not ratified by eight countries out of 44 with nuclear weapons or means to create them, including the US. On November 2, 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law according to which Moscow was revoking its CTBT ratification. As Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed, this does not mean that Russia is planning on conducting nuclear tests.