Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has condemned calls by United States President Donald Trump for the Pentagon to resume nuclear weapons testing, calling the move both “regressive” and irresponsible”.
“Having rebranded its ‘Department of Defense’ as the ‘Department of War,’ a nuclear-armed bully is resuming testing of atomic weapons,” Araghchi wrote in a post on X late Thursday.
“The same bully has been demonising Iran’s peaceful nuclear program and threatening further strikes on our safeguarded nuclear facilities, all in blatant violation of international law,” he said.
Trump made the surprise announcement in a Truth Social post on Thursday shortly before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.
Trump said he had instructed the Pentagon to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing “on an equal basis” with other countries like Russia and China, whose nuclear weapons arsenal will match the US in “five years”, according to Trump.
Ankit Panda, a nuclear security expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera that Trump’s decision was likely a response to recent actions by Russia and China rather than Washington’s ongoing dispute with Iran over its nuclear programme.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week that Moscow had tested its Poseidon nuclear-powered super torpedo, after separately testing new Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missiles earlier in the month, according to the Reuters news agency.
China also recently displayed its nuclear prowess at a military parade in September, which featured new and modified nuclear weapons systems like the Dongfeng-5 nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile.
Despite these public displays of firepower, neither Russia nor China has carried out a nuclear test – defined as a nuclear explosion above ground, underground, or underwater – in decades, according to the United Nations.
Nuclear testing is banned by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban-Treaty of 1996. The US, China, and Iran all signed but have not ratified the original treaty, while Russia withdrew its ratification in 2023.
Moscow carried out its last nuclear test in 1990 while still the Soviet Union, and China carried out its last nuclear test in 1996, according to the UN. The last nuclear test by the United Kingdom was in 1991, followed by the US in 1992 and France in 1996. North Korea is the only country that has carried out nuclear tests in the past two decades, with its last test in 2017.
Trevor Findlay, a nuclear security expert and honorary professional fellow at the University of Melbourne, told Al Jazeera that it was unclear what type of testing Trump was referring to in his post.
“My assumption is that he means missile launches of nuclear-capable missiles, as North Korea and Russia have been doing very publicly. These do not carry an actual nuclear warhead [but likely a dummy], nor do they create a nuclear explosion,” he said.
“The US already tests its own missiles periodically, both existing ones and ones in development, often splashing down in the Pacific. It does announce them but tends not to make a big deal of it, like North Korea and Russia,” he said.
Trump, meanwhile, has called for the “total dismantlement” of Iran’s nuclear programme and says he does not want Tehran to obtain a nuclear weapon. In June, the US and Israel also carried out air strikes on Iranian military and nuclear facilities in part to slow its progress.
Tehran has maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes only, and it has never carried out a nuclear test, according to the Carnegie Endowment’s Panda.
“Iran has never done any nuclear tests. They’ve constantly been saying they are not intending to make a nuclear bomb,” Panda told Al Jazeera. “The only thing that Iran has which might be taken seriously is some highly enriched uranium. That’s it. They have not even tested a nuclear ballistic missile.”
