The Return of Nuclear Brinkmanship?

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This article was first published here. This is a revised version and is republished with the author's permission.

US President Donald Trump's statement in the run-up to his October 30 meeting in Busan with Chinese President Xi Jinping has sparked a wide-ranging debate. In a post on his Truth Social, Trump announced that the United States would resume nuclear testing, in response to atomic threats he said were coming from Russia and China. The move was seen across the board as marking an end to 33 years of restraint since the last US underground test in Nevada in September 1992.

Yet just days later, on November 2, Energy Secretary Chris Wright sought to calm growing concerns. He insisted the United States had no intention of returning to explosive testing, saying it would continue instead with routine examinations of nuclear components to ensure their reliability. "These will be non-nuclear explosions," he said on Fox News' Sunday Briefing. "We are developing sophisticated systems, so our replacement nuclear weapons are even better than the ones before."

Dr Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University, explained that nations have many ways to test the credibility of their nuclear deterrent. These tests, he explained, extend far beyond missiles and warheads to include command-and-control systems. Adam Lowther, Co-founder and VP for Research at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies, emphasised that Trump was enabling American scientists to conduct hydrostatic tests—non-explosive procedures that yield higher-fidelity data — as Washington modernises its arsenal and builds its first new warhead in more than a generation. "This is a very important distinction," Lowther stressed.

But the current debate overlooks a deeper reality: nuclear restraint and nuclear deterrence have always been inseparable and paradoxical. Deterrence is framed as defensive but depends on the threat of catastrophic force. Legal scholars such as Kimiaki Kawai argue, in works like Nuclear Deterrence and the Threat of Force, that this very logic violates international law, which forbids not only the use of force but also the threat of it.

This contradiction is not new. In 1945, strategist Bernard Brodie wrote in The Absolute Weapon that the bomb's chief purpose was to prevent war, not win it: "The chief purpose of our military establishment must be to avert wars rather than to win them." Yet early US planners still saw atomic bombs as military tools. A 1945 Joint Chiefs of Staff report even recommended targeting "population centres" to break morale—an idea radically at odds with emerging humanitarian law.

From Brodie's deterrence logic and William Borden's arguments for nuclear war-fighting came the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. The later theorists Glenn Snyder and Robert Jervis defined deterrence as preventing hostile action through credible threats of retaliation. According to this view, peace rests on fear—a dynamic that continues to shape global politics today.

The atomic explosion marked both a scientific leap and a moral rupture. Despite the prohibition not only of the use but even of the threat of force in the UN Charter, which was adopted the same year, post-war stability was nonetheless based on the threat of nuclear annihilation. In 1996, the International Court of Justice ruled that the threat or use of atomic weapons generally violates international law, with narrow exceptions in very particular cases of self-defence.

This is the root of legal uncertainty in deterrence: the threat of using nuclear weapons may be illegal because their actual use would violate humanitarian principles. Thus, dependence on such weapons falls short of accepted yardsticks of lawful defence—and subjects all states to unrelenting pressure, even if the weapons are never used.

Trump's 2025 declaration echoed his earlier rhetoric, his "fire and fury" threat to North Korea in 2017, and his call to build "ten times more" nuclear weapons. Such language is quintessential coercive signalling, where credibility resides not in restraint but in appearing willing to act.

He sought to appear strong vis-à-vis Russia and China by signalling readiness to test but instead undercut America's legal and moral authority. Russia threatened to take symmetrical measures if any state broke the testing moratorium. China denounced the statement as strategic coercion. Some European officials sensed that even non-explosive tests could weaken the nuclear taboo and destabilise NATO. Hibakusha in Japan denounced the remarks as casting Hiroshima's shadow over humanity.

As Kawai and other scholars highlight, deterrence has an inherently reciprocal nature: every threat invites a counter-threat, and thus, deterrence calls forth counter-deterrence. In this way, deterrence lets loose a ‘threat-based hierarchy’ that privileges nuclear-armed states over those without, in the process entrenching global inequalities.

A resumption of US testing, symbolic or otherwise, would be a breach of the spirit both of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This latter Treaty, now ratified by more than ninety states, prohibits the use and threat of nuclear weapons, a lacuna left by the UN Charter. Although the nuclear-armed states refuse to join the Treaty, its growing support shows that a moral and legal consensus is building: the mere possession of nuclear arms constitutes a threat to humanity.

This shift challenges long-held assumptions. Preparing for nuclear tests exposes the moral core of the debate: can peace be built on the readiness to destroy? The TPNW proposes a different vision—security grounded not in fear, but in its absence.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin's nuclear threats showed just how fragile the nuclear taboo had become. Trump had previously normalised such posturing through his rhetoric. Both leaders blurred the line between deterrence and intimidation, using nuclear weapons as tools of political pressure rather than last-resort defence.

Deterrence is not a neutral practice. Maintaining vast arsenals and first-use options entrenches inequality. In East Asia, US security guarantees limit regional autonomy. In Europe, NATO embeds states in a system premised on existential threat. As Kawai writes, deterrence is not peace–it is coercion, plain and simple.

It is a contradiction that has always been there. The philosopher Michael Walzer wrote of nuclear weapons that they are "designed to kill whole populations," and that their deterrent value depends precisely on that capacity—whether or not the killing is direct.

During his first term, Trump withdrew from key arms-control agreements: the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). He expanded the tactical role of nuclear weapons, further blurring the boundary between legality and ethics. Deterrence once more appeared as a pact with destruction—a peace kept by the threat of annihilation.

Quietly, President Joe Biden discarded Trump's testing proposal but reaffirmed deterrence as the cornerstone of US strategy. His 2022 Nuclear Posture Review stated that nuclear weapons "continue to play a unique role in deterring strategic attacks." Such thinking remains evident in the crises in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Taiwan Strait.

With his latest statement on nuclear testing, Donald Trump sharpens an enduring divide: one between security rooted in law and security rooted in dominance. The world now stands at a crossroads between the rule of law and the rule of force.

Related articles:

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The Ultimate Deterrent: Modern Strategic Conventional Weapons (3-minute read)

Department of War: George Orwell would feel validated (3-minute read)

Drone Technology and the Future of Nuclear Weapons (3-minute read)

The Myths Behind the Romantic Faith in the Bomb (3-minute read)

Ramesh Jaura is a journalist with sixty years of experience, former head of Inter Press Service, and founder-editor of IDN-InDepthNews. He writes at https://rjaura.substack.com.