Trump, Putin and the return of the nuclear threat
Last week, a year after his return to power, Donald Trump announced that he had ordered the U.S. Department of Defense to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing. In a matter of months, the White House occupant has been unveiling the fine print of the ultraconservative handbook that the Heritage Foundation designed in 2023 to reshape the U.S. government. The more than 900 pages of the so-called 2025 Project already envisioned the dismissal of thousands of civil servants, the expansion of presidential power, and the dismantling of the Department of Education and other federal agencies. But they also advocated for the resumption of nuclear testing in the Nevada desert. Although detonating an underground nuclear bomb would violate the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the United States signed in 1996, Trump has once again resurrected the nuclear threat amidst a sweeping modernization plan.
Furthermore, in the midst of the federal government shutdown, the Republican administration also managed to unlock $80 billion last week for the Westinghouse Electric Company group for the construction of new nuclear reactors by 2030. Faced with the energy voracity of artificial intelligence, giant companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have announced their intention to connect their data centers to reactors. In fact, Microsoft is helping to reactivate the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which closed in 2019, while Google (owned by Alphabet) and Amazon are investing in next-generation nuclear technology.
This push for nuclear energy production, which could break world records in 2025, has been intertwined with escalating rhetoric on the Trump administration's agenda. According to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia currently possesses 5,459 nuclear warheads, followed by the United States with 5,177, and China in a distant third place with 600. Therefore, Trump's message—published shortly before his meeting with Xi Jinping and after successfully testing a nuclear-powered underwater drone capable of creating a tsunami that could devastate entire cities—fueled the renewed threat of mutual destruction amidst uncertainty about what instruments remain to halt this rearmament process.
The extension of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as New START, the last remaining nuclear arms agreement between Russia and the United States, which Putin abandoned in 2023, expires on February 4, 2026. Just a few days ago, Rafael Grossi of the IAEA warned that the world could go from 9 to "25 or 30" countries with nuclear weapons if the international non-proliferation regime is further weakened.
In parallel with the confrontational rhetoric employed by Washington and Moscow, the two European nuclear states—France and the United Kingdom—are also engaged in their own process of modernizing their atomic weapons. Since 2021, the British government has been expanding its pool of nuclear commanders and, as a member of the trilateral AUKUS agreement, along with the United States and Australia, is training hundreds of Australian officers in reactor management to prepare Canberra for its future acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. France, too, is developing its own "next-generation" submarine design to guarantee "nuclear deterrence at sea."
Almost three decades after the treaty that ended nuclear testing and restricted the capacity of atomic arsenals, the threat is back on the agenda. At a time of crisis in international governance and widespread rearmament, Trump's words, even if they amount to nothing more than verbal overreaction, fuel the risk of a new race to bolster nuclear arsenals.
