US Navy handout shows United States atomic bomb test conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. (Photo via Reuters)
The United States is planning to conduct a nuclear test as the Trump administration backtracks on US treaties to reduce nuclear arms, reigniting a dangerous and new Cold War.
Top national security officials of the Trump administration discussed performing the United States first nuclear test since 1992 at a meeting last Friday, the Washington Post reported late on Friday.
The Post reported that multiple members of the Trump administration claim Russia and China have both performed low-yield nuclear tests.
The threat was addressed at the meeting on May 15 of senior officials representing the top national security agencies.
A senior administration official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that demonstrating to Moscow and Beijing that the United States could "rapid test" could prove useful from a negotiating standpoint as Washington seeks a trilateral deal to regulate the arsenals of the biggest nuclear powers.
Recently, Trump claimed the US will beat its main adversaries, namely, Russia and China, by using what he called the "super duper missile."
"We have no choice, we have to do it with the adversaries we have out there. We have, I call it the super duper missile and I heard the other night [its] 17 times faster than what they have right now," Trump said while unveiling the flag for his new Space Force in the Oval Office in the White House.
Meanwhile, an American political analyst believes the Neoconservatives running the Trump administration were exaggerating the military threat posed by China and Russia to justify maintaining the countrys armed interventions and its military-industrial complex.
Experts believe Trump aims to reignite the Cold War-era nuclear arms race in a reversal of the US policy followed by all his predecessors; a move that would have grave consequence for the world.
US presidents started efforts to reduce nuclear weapons less than a decade after an American B-29 bomber dropped the worlds first deployed atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Shortly after, efforts were underway to achieve a test ban accord of nuclear bombs.
Finally, in 1963 the US and the former Soviet Union signed a treaty to limit testing atomic bombs in the atmosphere, in space and underwater.
Back then, US President John F. Kennedy declared that the US would cease testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, urging the Soviet Union to follow suit.
Trump reversed this peace initiative by announcing that the US would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which was signed toward the end of the Cold War in 1987 by then-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
The treaty - seen as a milestone in ending the Cold War arms race between the two superpowers - banned ground-launch nuclear missiles with ranges from 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers and led to the elimination of nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles.
Russia has warned the Trump administration that a renewed Cold War-era nuclear arms race would have grave consequence for the world.
SOURCE: PRESS TV
LINK: https://www.ansarpress.com/english/17842
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