TEHRAN – Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association (ACA), says if the United States conducts nuclear testing it will likely “blow apart the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty” or NPT.

On October 30, Trump ordered the Pentagon to immediately restart the process for testing nuclear weapons after a halt of 33 years. "Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately," Trump wrote on Truth Social while aboard his Marine One helicopter flying to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping for a trade-negotiating session in Busan, South Korea.

“If Trump is serious and he tries to push forward to try to resume U.S. nuclear explosive testing, it will continue to trigger strong international opposition that would likely unleash a dangerous chain reaction of nuclear testing by Russia, the DPRK, India, and perhaps others, and blow apart the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty,” Kimball tells the Tehran Times.

Kimball says the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) and the norm against nuclear testing has made the world a safer place. He says it is “crucial” that all governments calmly but directly urge the United States and all other nuclear-armed states to respect the global nuclear test moratorium, and people in states that have not yet ratified the CTBT, including in the U.S., China, and Russia, call upon their governments to do so to bring the treaty into “full legal force”.

The following is the text of the interview:

President Trump has ordered the Department of War to start testing nuclear weapons. What are the repercussions of this order, especially as you have warned that it would be “a mistake of historic international security proportions?”

If Trump is serious and he tries to push forward to try to resume U.S. nuclear explosive testing, it will continue to trigger strong international opposition that would likely unleash a dangerous chain reaction of nuclear testing by Russia, the DPRK, India, and perhaps others, and blow apart the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. However, there is growing opposition in Congress and in the state of Nevada and amongst U.S. allies to any move by the White House to resume nuclear explosive testing.

Trump said nuclear testing would be “on an equal basis” by claiming that "Russia's testing, and China's testing, but they don't talk about it." Please explain about such an unwarranted claim.

No country except North Korea has conducted a nuclear test explosion in this century, and its last test was in 2017. I believe Trump is confused or misinformed about the activities that other states are pursuing to build up the size of their arsenal (China), the flight tests of missiles that can carry nuclear warheads (Russia and China) and possible development of long-range missiles by others (Pakistan), and is erroneously calling these “nuclear tests."

Many nuclear scientists and nonproliferation experts have said the U.S. had little to gain from live drills. What is your opinion?

“The United States has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing.”

The United States has no technical, military, or political reason to resume nuclear explosive testing since the last U.S. test in 1992. That was the year that a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Congress mandated a nuclear test moratorium. Under public pressure, President Clinton extended the U.S. moratorium on testing in 1993 and helped launch talks on a global ban on nuclear explosive testing. In 1996, Clinton was the first leader to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which has established a global norm against nuclear testing. A total of 187 states have signed the treaty.

The United States has conducted 1,030 nuclear test explosions since 1945, which is the majority of all 2,056 nuclear test explosions worldwide. The vast majority of these nuclear explosions were intended to prove that new designs of nuclear warheads performed as expected. Today the United States has several nuclear warhead types that are already well-proven and there is no new “requirement” for a new design that requires nuclear test explosions.

Brandon Williams, current administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said at his confirmation hearing earlier this year that: "we collected more data than anyone else. And it is precisely that data that has underpinned our scientific basis for confirming the stockpile. I would not advise … testing.”

In Williams’ response to written questions from Congress, he said:  "The United States continues to observe its 1992 nuclear test moratorium; and, since 1992, has assessed that the deployed nuclear stockpile remains safe, secure, and effective without nuclear explosive testing.”

Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright who has said "these are not nuclear explosions," calling them “non-critical explosions." What is your comment?

The U.S. Secretary of Energy said on Nov. 2 that Trump must have been referring to the non-explosive “subcritical nuclear experiments” that are designed to help U.S. weapons scientists understand how the plutonium in U.S. nuclear warheads behaves over time. But the White House has not yet confirmed that this is what Trump meant.