US TO RESUME NUCLEAR WEAPONS TESTING

President Donald Trump has ordered the United States military to immediately resume testing nuclear weapons for the first time in more than three decades.

- Agencies

The surprise announcement came minutes before his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, marking a major shift in U.S. nuclear policy.

Writing on his Truth Social platform , Trump said he had instructed the Department of War to begin testing on an “equal basis” with other nuclear powers such as Russia and China. “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,’ he wrote.

Trump said the United States has “more Nuclear Weapons than any other country,’ describing Russia as second and China as a “distant third” but predicting that China “will be even within five years.”

He added that the testing order was necessary because other nations were modernizing their arsenals.

The United States has not conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1992, when the last underground detonation took place in Nevada under the project code-named Divider. The order effectively reverses a moratorium on testing introduced by former President George H. W. Bush at the end of the Cold War.