Nuclear tests ordered by Trump 'are not nuclear explosions', says Energy Secretary: 'They are system tests'
Chris Wright, the energy secretary in Donald Trump's cabinet, photographed in the Oval Office, PHOTO: Samuel Corum-CNP / Splash News / Profimedia
The nuclear tests ordered by US President Donald Trump will not, for now, involve nuclear explosions, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Sunday, according to Reuters.
“I think the tests we're talking about now are system tests,” Wright said in an interview with Fox News. “It's not about nuclear explosions, it's about what we call non-critical explosions.”
The testing involves all the other parts of a nuclear weapon to see if they work and can trigger a nuclear explosion, said Wright, whose department is in charge of testing U.S. nuclear weapons.
The tests will be conducted on new systems to ensure that the replacement nuclear weapons are more capable than their predecessors, Wright said on Fox News' “The Sunday Briefing.”
Shortly before his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea on Thursday, Donald Trump announced that he had ordered the US military to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing after a 33-year hiatus, a move that appeared to send a message to nuclear rivals China and Russia.
On Friday, the US president reaffirmed his statements, but avoided answering directly when asked if they included underground nuclear tests, which were practiced frequently during the Cold War.
“The United States conducted nuclear test explosions in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s,” said Wright, who collected detailed information and measurements about those explosions.
“With the help of science and our computing power, we can simulate with incredible precision exactly what will happen in a nuclear explosion,” Wright said.
“Now we're simulating what the conditions were that produced those effects, and as we change the bomb designs, what results will those produce?”
