New Delhi, Nov 3: US President Donald Trump has claimed that Pakistan is among several countries actively testing nuclear weapons, a justification, he said, for his administration’s decision to restart America’s own nuclear testing programme after more than three decades.
According to a report in The Times of India, Trump made the remarks during an interview with CBS News’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, alleging that Russia, China, North Korea and Pakistan were all conducting nuclear tests while the United States had refrained from doing so.
“Russia’s testing and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it. We’re an open society. We’re different. We talk about it because otherwise you people are going to report. They don’t have reporters that are going to be writing about it,” Trump said, as reported by ANI.
He went on to say, “We’re going to test because they test and others test. And certainly North Korea’s been testing. Pakistan’s been testing.” When pressed about the implications of resuming nuclear detonations, Trump argued that such tests were essential to ensure the reliability and advancement of America’s weapons systems, pointing to recent nuclear-capable trials by Russia.
“You have to see how they work… We’re the only country that doesn’t test. And I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” he added. The Times of India report noted that Trump’s announcement, made first on social media minutes before his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea caused considerable confusion among US officials and international observers. The last confirmed US nuclear explosion took place in 1992.
While no country apart from North Korea is known to have carried out a full-scale nuclear detonation in recent decades, Trump maintained that other nations “test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening.” US Energy Secretary Chris Wright later sought to clarify the statement, saying that current internal discussions referred only to “non-critical” system evaluations and not live nuclear explosions.
