Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer told Newsmax that President Donald Trump’s decision to restart U.S. nuclear weapons testing marks a long-overdue response to rising global threats, particularly from China’s expanding nuclear arsenal.
The president of Project Sentinel appeared on “The Chris Salcedo Show” on Thursday, where he defended Trump’s order to resume nuclear weapons testing after a 33-year halt.
Shaffer said the move was a long time coming and reflected geopolitical realities that previous administrations had ignored. “There are two things which have been lacking in that very premise. First, we have not done anything since 1992. That’s a long time,” he told Salcedo.
“Secondly, right now, at this moment, the time we’re speaking, 87% of all nuclear weapons on the planet are controlled by the United States and Russia. We control that,” Shaffer noted.
“With that said, China now has 300 nuclear warheads. They have a plan. They are building rapidly, going towards 1000 warheads by 2030. We don’t know why. I think we all have ideas,” he added.
Trump’s directive, announced on Truth Social while aboard Marine One en route to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, called for the military to “immediately restart the process for testing nuclear weapons.”
The order comes amid heightened competition with both Russia and China, signaling to rivals that the United States is prepared to modernize its deterrence strategy.
Shaffer explained that past administrations discussed nuclear modernization but lacked the will to act.
“This issue was something being discussed by multiple White Houses. Nobody was willing to do anything about it, [but] President Trump [is] willing to do something about it,” he said.
Shaffer argued that the United States’ self-imposed limitations have weakened its strategic position.
“With that said, we then hobbled ourselves by not doing testing of new weapons. And further, we refused to actually have something called the intermediate range nuclear weapons that are necessary,” he said.
He argued that these weapons were previously eliminated through treaties negotiated during the Cold War.
“We negotiated those away during the Cold War. We broke that treaty with Russia last year, not because of Russia, because we need to, because we need to be prepared to fight with intermediate-range nuclear weapons if the Chinese do something,” Shaffer said.
He concluded that Trump’s order reflects the reality of an increasingly unstable world. “So that’s what’s going on here. This is simply President Trump and [Secretary of War] Pete Hegseth acting on the reality we face regarding other threats regarding their nuclear programs that we know exist,” he concluded.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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