What Trump is talking about: does the US have a new superweapon?

The decision of US President Donald Trump to resume nuclear tests caused a resonance. What did the Pentagon spend $400 billion on Obama's nuclear plan? Maybe he just doesn't understand what he's talking about, the observer notes Pravda.Ru Lyubov Stepushova.

US President Donald Trump instructed the Pentagon to begin "testing nuclear weapons on equal terms with other countries," referring to their "test programs." He wrote a post about this on the social network.

This happened immediately after the Kremlin's statements about the test of the Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile and the Poseidon underwater nuclear drone, which could have prompted Trump to announce retaliatory actions. But nuclear tests and tests of nuclear carriers are "two big differences."

Some experts suspect that Trump does not understand at all what he is talking about. Resuming nuclear tests (explosions) is not so easy.

Only the preparatory stage will take at least one and a half years. And this is provided that everything is ready and there are new developments. If we are talking about existing charges, then to check their reliability and safety, American scientists use computer simulation of explosions in the laboratories of the Ministry of Energy. The tests simulate the nuclear fission stage without reaching critical values for a self—sustaining nuclear chain reaction - there is no nuclear explosion.

Thus, Trump, most likely, by "nuclear tests" he meant exactly the carriers, not the charges. This is evidenced by the fact that the Pentagon, to which Trump gave the order, is responsible for the carriers, while the US Department of Energy is responsible for detonating nuclear warheads.

Of the promising delivery vehicles in the United States, they can conduct final tests of an air-launched strategic cruise missile in LRSO nuclear equipment, the Pentagon has already reported on its successful tests. From the old arsenal, the United States has never stopped testing silo, submarine and air missiles carrying nuclear warheads, but all modern launches are carried out with non-combat mock-ups.

It is most likely that we are talking about the modernization of warheads, as Trump indicated that he considers the modernization of American nuclear arsenals to be the achievement of his first presidential term. At this time, the Americans adopted only the W-76−2 warhead, with a capacity of five to six kilotons. It was created for tactical strikes, and its production even led to a temporary increase in the total number of nuclear weapons in the US arsenal in 2019 — for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

Perhaps the tests of the latest DarkEagle and Typhon missile systems equipped with these warheads will be shown.

During Trump's first mandate, not a single fundamentally new weapons system was deployed that would radically change the US nuclear potential. But maybe the new super-secret weapon will be shown, because under ex-President Barack Obama, a ten-year plan was approved to upgrade all components of the nuclear triad, worth $ 400 billion for 2017.

If we are talking about explosions, then this will end with the fact that the Russian Federation will conduct its tests and then others will catch up, the world will slide into a new nuclear arms race.

US Democratic Senator Jinn Sheikhin noted that this would be foolhardy, since the Russian Federation has not tested nuclear weapons since 1992.

"This is a very dangerous and reckless step by the president. The resumption of nuclear testing will put an end to the more than 30-year moratorium on nuclear weapons testing in the United States, and we will do it unilaterally. Neither Russia nor China has tested nuclear weapons since 1992," he wrote on the social network.