On October 30, 2025, US President Donald J Trump announced that he had instructed the Department of War of the US government to resume nuclear testing. In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “The United States has more nuclear weapons than any other country. This was accomplished, including a complete update and renovation of existing weapons, during my first term in office. Because of the tremendous destructive power, I hated to do it, but had no choice! Russia is second, and China is a distant third, but will be even after 5 years. Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis. That process will begin immediately. Thank you for an attention to this matter!” The social media post happened just a few moments before Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea. With this the US government scrapped the voluntary moratorium on nuke tests after a gap of almost 33 years. The announcement from Trump came just a few days after the Russian government formally declared the successful test of two cutting-edge strategic weapons: the nuclear-propelled Burevestnik cruise missile with unlimited range, and the much-awaited Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater drone that can be fired like a torpedo from submarines for destroying coastal cities.
To add fuel to the fire, President Donald J Trump officially stated on November 2, 2025 that the United States was compelled to resume nuclear testing as other countries like Pakistan, China, North Korea and Russia were already conducting secret underground nuclear tests. This fully endorsed US government reports that have many times raised suspicions that Russia and China may have conducted very low-yield or “sub-critical” tests of nuclear weapons that could technically violate the “zero-yield” benchmark of testing moratorium.
More, in a remote desert where China conducted its inaugural atomic bomb test sixty years ago, suspicious activities sparked international concern last year. According to a New York Times report, a drilling rig punctured a deep vertical shaft, potentially plunging over a third of a mile into the earth. The development signals that China may be getting ready to test a new breed of nuclear weaponry, enhancing the lethality of its expanding missile arsenal. Previously shrouded in vague speculations and concerns cited in US government reports, Lop Nur, the aging base, has now come under increased scrutiny. Satellite imagery has exposed fresh boreholes, optimal for containing the lethal aftermath of sizable nuclear detonations, amidst numerous upgrades and expansions across the military complex.
The global nuke test race
The United States of America has carried out 1032 nuclear bomb tests between 1945 and 1992, followed by the former Soviet Union which executed tests of 981 nuke devices between 1949 and 1990. Following the footsteps of the two cold-war era rivals, France has executed 215 such tests between 1960 and 1996, whereas the United Kingdom has test fired 88 nuclear weapons between 1952 and 1991. China has fired 48 nuclear devices of various yields during testing exercises held between 1964 and 1996. India has carried out live tests of just six nuclear devices from 1974 to 1998. Pakistan has also six underground nuclear tests in 1998 in response to India’s tests. North Korea has tested six nuclear bombs between 2006 and 2017. It is believed that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. But there is no concrete evidence of any live nuclear explosive test being carried out by the Jewish nation barring the “Vela incident” of September 22, 1979 which is widely considered as a secret Israeli nuclear weapon test in the Indian Ocean detected by an American spy satellite.
India’s nuclear weapons journey
India has always maintained a strategic but ambiguous approach towards realising operational nuclear weapons capability. The nation’s first even nuclear test (Smiling Buddha) took place on May 18, 1974 under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The experiment which involved a pure fission weapon, had an explosive yield of around 10 kilotons of TNT. This was starkly low in contrast to the explosive yields of “Little Boy” (15 kilotons) and “Fat Man” (21 kilotons) bombs dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively. The six kilograms of Plutonium used in the design of the atomic bomb came from the CIRUS reactor located at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) complex in Trombay. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi diplomatically played down the test as a “peaceful nuclear explosion” fearing global geopolitical ramifications.
With the design of the pure fission weapon validated, there was increasing pressure from the Indian scientific community on subsequent Indian governments during the 1980s for carrying out further live tests in order to realise the designs of more advanced and powerful nukes. For obvious reasons, the next logical step was to fire a boosted-fission weapon. Unlike a pure-fission bomb, a boosted-fission device uses a small amount of fusion fuel to increase the rate and yield of a fission reaction. But with little room for live testing due to lack of political intent, Indian scientists were silently given the go-ahead to design and develop a full-fledged two-stage thermonuclear device (popularly known as Hydrogen Bomb) by the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1985. The device was finally ready for testing in 1995 under the leadership of the then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. But the 1995 test plans were cancelled after US reconnaissance satellites blew off the covers in Pokhran.
The H-bomb conundrum
After the ground shook under the hot desert sands of Pokhran on May 11, 1998, India had officially declared herself as a ‘full-fledged nuclear weapons power’ with three simultaneous nuclear blasts. Two more detonations followed on May 13, 1998, thus ending the series of planned tests. Soon after the series of explosions was over, eyebrows were raised in Western scientific and media circles regarding the blast-yield of one of the underground detonations. The thermonuclear weapon prototype which was reportedly detonated at an explosive yield of around 45 kilotons, soon found itself in the middle of the controversy. The device reportedly had a design yield of up to 200 kilotons and was dubbed as a fizzle by some Western experts. But the country’s scientific establishment later conducted an official press conference in which eminent scientists- Dr APJ Abdul Kalam and Dr Rajagopalachari Chidambaram said that the thermonuclear weapon performed on expected lines and that the blast yield of the Shakti-1 thermonuclear device was deliberately kept low taking into consideration the terrain and topography of the area and the test site’s proximity to Khetolai village.
BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) officially clarified that Shakti-1 was a highly compact thermonuclear device which used a sophisticated fusion-boosted-fission trigger as the primary stage and a Tritium cylinder as the secondary stage.
In order to put all controversies to rest, BARC also executed a radiochemical analysis of soil and rock samples extracted from the thermonuclear blast site. The post-shot radioactivity measurement report on the samples says: “The signatures of the fusion reaction are activation products due to 14 MeV neutrons, such as, 54Mn, 22Na, 58Co, 46Sc, as marked in the gamma-ray spectrum. The estimation of 14 MeV neutron yield from the measured radioactivity of these products requires the knowledge of the amount of the target elements present at the site of the event and the reaction cross sections. The two major radionuclides which could be assayed in most of the samples were 54Mn and 46Sc. Although the fission neutron spectrum has a high energy tail, the total number of neutrons produced by fusion fraction being much larger, the majority of the high energy neutrons can be attributed to fusion neutrons. The possible sources of error in the measurement of fission yield are: assay of radioactivity (5-7 percent); nuclear data such as half-life, gamma-ray branching intensity and fission yields (8 percent); and the error in integration which arises mainly due to the error in Rc (15 percent). In the assessment of fusion yield, the sources of errors are uncertainty in the elemental composition of the surrounding rock and its effect on the neutron spectrum used in the Monte Carlo simulations of the activity. The propagation of these errors leads to an overall error on the measured yield which is around 20 percent. Thus, it is concluded that the total yield of the thermonuclear device is 50 + 10 kT.” While the report confirms that 14 MeV neutrons were found as a result of initialisation of the fusion reaction from the secondary stage of the bomb, the total explosive yield has been repeatedly disputed by senior scientists like Late Dr K Santhanam and Dr PK Iyenger who have argued that the total yield of the thermonuclear blast didn’t exceed 20 kilotons. More, the presence of 14 MeV neutrons in the soil samples, might prove that there was a fusion reaction, but at no point proves that the secondary stage of the Hydrogen Bomb wasn’t a fizzle. This once again puts into doubt the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government’s claim of having a deployable thermonuclear deterrence in operational configurations. In fact, the Shakti-1 design required more live testing, which never really happened due to India’s self-imposed voluntary moratorium on experimental nuclear explosions.
Why India should resume testing
While it is a well-known fact that no nuclear power in the world has been able to successfully test a double-staged thermonuclear weapon in the very first attempt, the Indian test and the ensuing speculations about the blast yields raises doubt over the deployability of the capability in operational warhead configuration atop Agni series of medium-range, intermediate-range and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. Renowned national security experts like Bharat Karnad have repeatedly publicly stated that India should resume thermonuclear testing for mastering the double staged fusion design (Teller-Ulam design).
India’s arch foe- China has already achieved the boosted-fission weapon capability through Project-596L (layer cake design) way back in 1966 and has also mastered its two-stage thermonuclear capability via Project-639 in 1967.
Supercomputer simulations?
Supercomputer simulations can replace physical nuclear weapon tests only if a country has “exascale” computational capability (i.e.,“one billion billion” – 18 zeroes — operations per second) that only the US, Russia, and China have. Place the fastest Indian supercomputer, Pratyush, with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology capable of 20 petaflops (15 zeroes) capacity alongside, and the problem becomes evident. Assuming optimistically that BARC has a 150-petaflop supercomputer (a level Pratyush expects to reach, finances permitting), it is still dwarfed by the US ‘Summit’ and the Chinese ‘Sunway TaihuLight’ exascale supercomputers. More daunting still, in October 2021 China claimed revolutionary technological breakthroughs with its ‘Zuchongzhi 2.1’ supercomputer featuring superconducting quantum computing and photonics quantum computing that is “10 million times faster” than ‘Summit’.
India’s upcoming exascale supercomputer- “Param Shankh” which will be powered by an indigenous 96 core, ARM architecture-based processor named as “Aum”, may not take shape before 2030 which leaves a deep void towards generating data for advanced nuclear weapon designs.
India’s foes sharing data
China’s weapons programme, besides design and material help, also benefitted from Russian thermonuclear test data (as did the UK, French and Israeli fission and fusion weapons projects from American test data) and Pakistan and North Korea from Chinese test data transferred to them as part of the “rogue nuclear triad”. As sensitive information sharing is ongoing within this triad, Islamabad and Pyongyang may not have to test again to enhance their strategic weapons profiles. But it will be quite impractical to think that any of the P5 nations will share their nuclear test data with India for qualitatively enhancing India’s arsenal of nukes.
The road ahead
India is neither a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) nor a signatory to the CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty). Being a signatory to the PTBT (Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty), India already fulfils its obligations by never testing any nuclear weapon underwater, in the atmospheric regime or in space. As India has tested just six nuclear weapons till date, and due to lack of exascale-level supercomputers, the data is not matured enough to design next-generation nuclear weapons which will be very compact but will have higher explosive yields. It is quite evident that if the United States restart live testing of nuclear warheads, Russia and China will also follow suit, followed by North Korea. This will leave a golden opportunity for India to resume live testing of nuclear weapons without any hindrances. Along with sub-critical tests, India must use this opportunity to retest the much awaited two-stage Hydrogen Bomb (thermonuclear weapon) under the desert sands of Pokhran. The new datasets gathered from such tests must be used for simulations in the Param Shankh exascale supercomputer in future.
India should have never stopped live nuclear tests after 1998. The tests should have continued unabated till the country achieved a credible and reliable thermonuclear capability. The 123-agreement signed with the US has a clause (Article-14.2) which opens the door open for India to cite its “changed security environment” as a trigger for any new nuclear test. Moreover, Article-2.4 of the 123-pact also states: “purpose of this agreement is to provide for peaceful nuclear cooperation and not to affect the unsafeguarded nuclear activities of either party.” Hence, this clause will give India widespread diplomatic leverage as the country’s military grade nuclear reactors are totally outside the purview of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards. So, India has literally nothing to fear.
The only challenge for Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be to fend off the so-called peaceniks in the corridors of powers in Delhi and decision-making bodies who have done tremendous damage to India’s nuclear posture by freezing the nuclear weapons programme since the last two decades. Today, India is the fourth largest economy in the world and is poised to become the third largest by 2027. The nation has one of the largest militaries in the world. Hence, without any iota of doubt, India must seize this opportunity to carry out additional series of nuclear tests. If Pokhran’s geology doesn’t permit very high-yield megaton-level underground blasts, alternative underground nuclear testing sites in isolated places like Ladakh and Andaman & Nicobar Islands should also be built. Meanwhile, as per a US Congressional report, it will take the US government at least 24 to 36 months to prepare the Nevada site for nuclear tests. If an American nuclear test is expected by 2028, India should be ready to execute its Hydrogen Bomb test in the same year. Now is the time for preparing the Pokhran test site accordingly, so that it can match the expected timeline and the series of nuclear tests are executed just before the 2029 Lok Sabha elections. Many people in the Indian scientific community and policymaking bodies (including this journalist) have been waiting for Pokhran-3 blasts throughout their entire lifetime. The dream can be realised only by the incumbent BJP-led Hindu Nationalist NDA-3 government of beloved statesman Prime Minister Narendra Modi. If the Prime Minister takes a bold decision in this regard, it will be another feather in the cap for his unending legacy in the golden pages of history.
By AMARTYA SINHA
(The content of this article reflects the views of writer and contributor, not necessarily those of the publisher and editor. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only)
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