Nuclear weapons are scarcely mentioned in the U.S. 2024 political campaign nor in campaign media coverage. These costly and grotesque machines would seem non-existent on the election trail. Yet, Russia threatens to nuclear bomb Ukraine, Ukraine is threatening to build nuclear weapons, Israel threatens to bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, China is doubling its nuclear weapons stockpile, and the United States has begun a $1.7 Trillion “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal; already way over budget and years behind schedule.

Trump surrogates, however, have announced their future nuclear weapons plans. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth former National Security Advisor in Project 2025 and in Foreign Affairs magazine, wrote the U.S. should withdraw from the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, CTBT, and prepare to test nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert.

John Bolton, Trump’s third National Security Advisor, fired for opposing visits from the Taliban’s to Camp David, advises a future President Trump, “unsigning the CTBT should be a top U.S. priority”.

The Trump Administration seriously discussed plans to break out of the CTBT in 2020 with a “rapid test”, citing unsubstantiated claims Russian and China had conducted low yield nuclear explosions. Congress rushed $10 million at the time to prepare the Nevada National Security Site, NNSS, the former Nevada Test Site, for renewed nuclear testing.

The CTBT is a foundational nuclear arms control treaty whose negotiations began in the 1950’s Eisenhower Khrushchev era. No nuclear tests have been conducted by the major nuclear powers since the CTBT was signed by 187 countries in 1996; 178 of those have ratified it. The U.S. Senate has not ratified the treaty, last defeating ratification in 1999, 51-48 (ratification requires a 2/3 supermajority). Russia has withdrawn its ratification due to the Senate balking. So far, neither nuclear power has violated the treaty. North Korea has exploded six nuclear devices since 2006, the last in 2017.

Mikhael Gorbachev unilaterally halted Soviet nuclear tests in 1985. Congress suspended nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site in 1992 over President George HW Bush’s objection, in a veto-proof margin of 68-26 in the Senate. The US signed the Test Ban Treaty in 1996.

A Partial Test Ban Treaty agreed by President Kennedy and Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev in 1963 banned nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, underwater and in space. Growing scientific data showed that American and Soviet nuclear tests were poisoning their own citizens. The Eisenhower Administration had fumbled total test ban negotiations begun in 1956.

People on the ground in Nevada, where the majority of U.S. nuclear weapons tests took place from 1951 to 1992, have negative views about nuking their beloved high desert. Seventy-five percent of Nevadans oppose nuclear testing. Former officials of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly the Nevada Test Site, said the NNSS “wanted nothing to do with full-scale underground nuclear testing.”

Executive Director of Nevada’s Office of Nuclear Projects, Frank Dilger, said, “There is no need for full-scale underground testing. Project 2025 should have been labeled Project 1995 because the ideas are all old…for nuclear issues”.

Nevada Assembly Majority Leader Sandra Jauregui (D) said, “The risk of nuclear testing is too great.”

Former Obama Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz warned that “resuming explosive nuclear testing in Nevada will set off a diplomatic chain-reaction that will damage our national security and international standing.”

The original Nevadans, the Western Shoshone people, suffer the most significant harm from the nuclear detonations on the Nevada Test Site. The Great Nevada Basin, known to the indigenous people as Newe Sogobia, was deeded to the Shoshone Nation by treaty in 1863. Like many native tribal names, Shoshone means “people”, something the Atomic Energy Commission ignored when it confiscated 1350 square miles of Shoshone land to build the Nevada Test Site. More than 900 nuclear devices, both atmospheric and underground, were detonated there. Paleo-Indian peoples had lived in the Great Nevada Basin as long as 12,000 years ago.

“I saw my family dying”, said Ian Zabarte, Principal Man of the Western Shoshone Nation. “My grandfather’s skin fell off. We began to understand that nuclear weapons and fallout came through our community. The U.S. came to our country to test bombs. They didn’t ask for our consent. They didn’t tell us what was happening. I cannot let this go.”

In 1988, the American Peace Test rallied more than 8000 people at the Nevada Test Site to protest nuclear testing; 3000 were arrested, including musician Kris Kristofferson and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. Twelve hundred people were arrested in one day, setting an American record.

From 1945 until 1963, the U.S. conducted hundreds of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, undersea, and even in space at numerous sites, including the Marshall Islands, Johnston Atoll, and the Nevada Test Site.  The dozen nuclear explosions launched from Johnston Atoll into space spread radiation around the globe knocked out phone service in Hawaii and distant New Zealand and littered Johnston Atoll with bits of Plutonium.  The highest yield U.S. nuclear tests over one megaton (one million tons of TNT) were reserved for the Marshall Islands, a U.S. Trust Territory after WWII. Cumulatively, from 1946 to 1962, the U.S. nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands totaled more than 200 Megatons, 200 million tons of TNT, or eighty percent of the explosive power of all U.S. nuclear tests.

Compensation claims by newly independent Marshall Islanders reveal a pattern of lies, racist profiling, and unethical medical experiments dealing with Marshall Island inhabitants by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Congress has paid Marshall Islanders $750 million in compensation, but far less than the billions of dollars the Marshall Islanders demand. Some Marshall Islanders will never return to their home islands due to residual test radiation.

The Soviet Union conducted 219 atmospheric tests at its nuclear test facility in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. France also conducted 50 atmospheric nuclear tests in Pacific Polynesia, refusing to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty barring atmospheric tests. France conducted another 160 tests in Polynesia and Algeria until it signed the CTBT in 1996. Taken together, the Nevada Test Site, Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and the French testing site in Pacific Polynesia remain some of the most toxic sites on Earth. All are located on former colonized indigenous lands.

Other sites associated with the production of fissile material, the core of nuclear weapons, rank high as the nation’s most toxic places, including Hanford, WA, Rocky Flats, CO, and Savannah River Site, SC. Hundreds of smaller locations associated with the mining of uranium, primarily on native lands, and the manufacture of atomic weapons are also listed as “legacy sites” by the DOE; many will never be reclaimed.

The most prevalent radio-isotope produced by atmospheric nuclear tests was Carbon 14.  Readily absorbed by the oceans, C14 stays radioactive for 5000 years. Other radionuclide fallout will contaminate the Nevada Great Basin for tens of thousands of years. Many children living near the Nevada Test site thought the white flakey fall-out from nuclear tests was snow, played in it and caught it on their tongues.

Modern sensitive radiology instruments have to be manufactured from salvaged steel milled before nuclear testing, especially sunken ships from WWI. All modern steel has traces of radiation from nuclear testing, making “pre-war, pre-nuclear testing” extremely valuable.

Following the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, banning atmospheric testing, underground nuclear explosions still leaked radiation into the atmosphere and groundwater. All told the Nevada Test site spewed more than 500 times the radiation released at Chernobyl.

The qualitative measure of radiation, as it affects living tissue, is termed a “sievert”.  The Nevada Test Site released over four million “sieverts” of radiation across the United States. One “sievert” is a unit equivalent dose producing a 5.5.% chance of a fatal cancer in a human.

Citizens living near the test site, downwinders”, have experienced increased infant mortality, premature deaths, debilitating illness and high cancer rates due to radiation exposure beginning with the very first nuclear detonation, the 1945 Trinity test at Alamogordo NM. Congress did fund the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, RECA, in 1990 to pay some uranium workers and miners in the production of the first atom bombs. Some military troops and pilots, who, under orders, marched and flew through nuclear test fallout received benefits.  And some “downwinders” who suffered generations of cancers and pre-mature deaths from nuclear explosion tests in Nevada received $50,000. If informed at all about the nuclear tests “downwinders” were erroneously told by the Atomic Energy Commission no ill effects would result from the above ground or underground nuclear explosions. Some of these families lived only miles from the blast site.

RECA expired in June of 2024 and to date, no amount of cajoling of House Speaker Mike Johnson has convinced him to bring renewal of RECA to the Floor for a vote, though it has passed in the Senate and would likely pass in the House.

U.S. military and atomic experts also warn against withdrawing from CTBT and blowing up the nuclear testing taboo. Having amassed voluminous data collected from over 1000 nuclear test explosions, the U.S. has for better or for ill, orders of magnitude more technical information about nuclear explosions than anyone other than Russia. Breaking the CTBT would risk other countries quickly testing and closing the lead the U.S. has in nuclear explosion chemistry and physics.

The U.S. has not exploded a nuclear device since 1992, but it maintains a stockpile of over 5,000 nuclear warheads. (the U.S. has manufactured over 70,000 nuclear warheads since 1945). This “strategic stockpile” is analyzed for potency and safety at the same Nevada National Security Site, the same historic site where nuclear explosions took place. DOE warehouses as many as 15,000 stored and surplus plutonium pits at the PANTEX plant in Texas.

The NNSS, with a budget of $5 billion over 10 years, conducts sophisticated experiments that gauge the characteristics of plutonium as it ages. Some nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal are over 50 years old, prompting Congress to appropriate tens of billions of dollars for new plutonium pit production at Savannah River Site DC and Los Alamos NM. A federal court recently determined that these plans violate the National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA.   A controversial JASON report determined that plutonium pits would be reliable for at least 100 years. Still, plans for new pits and new nuclear bombs forge ahead.

Last year’s frenzy from DOE announcing a successful “fusion reaction” had little to do with generating limitless electricity in the future and almost everything to do with developing high-powered lasers to assay plutonium in the U.S. strategic stockpile. “Sub-criticality” tests subject plutonium samples from the nuclear stockpile to intense pressures, heat, and shock, shy of nuclear fission, “criticality.” Nearly one-half of DOE’s $50 Billion budget goes into nuclear weapons programs.

One obstacle to the CTBT agreement, and to many nuclear weapons control treaties, has been verification. Dozens of promising nuclear control treaties have been scuttled since 1946 due to a lack of confidence in a verification regime. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, CTBTO, established by the United Nations and based in Vienna, Austria, has assembled an international series of 300 monitoring sites to detect any illicit nuclear explosion. Based on seismic, hydro-phonic, and chemical assays of the atmosphere, the CTBTO can, within minutes, differentiate between an earthquake, large ocean waves, and landslides from a possible illegal nuclear test.

Were the United States Senate to ratify the CTBT, and Russia to re-ratify it, along with nine other nuclear powers, including China, it would come into force. The gold standard for verification, on-site inspections of adversaries’ test sites would then become law; on-site inspection, on demand.

Politicians should be crystal clear: the U.S. will never restart nuclear explosive testing. The Senate must assert leadership in nuclear diplomacy it once demonstrated, and ratify the CTBT. The U.S., as the only country to detonate nuclear weapons in war, must halt the nuclear arms race beginning again.

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