Trump’s Nuclear Test Could Cost $100 Million, Experts Warn

President Donald Trump’s call to resume nuclear weapons testing would cost Americans an astronomical amount for very little gain, experts warn.

Trump broke a three-decade moratorium on live nuclear explosions when he posted on Truth Social on Wednesday that he was ordering the “Department of War” — his preferred name for the Department of Defense — to “immediately” begin testing the U.S. nuclear stockpile “on an equal basis” with other nuclear nations.

The move is framed as a response to Russia, China, and North Korea, all of which have advanced or conducted illegal underground nuclear tests. But experts say bringing back tests in the United States is far from simple.

Former National Nuclear Security Administration acting principal deputy administrator Corey Hinderstein told The Washington Post that even a single test — just detonating one warhead in an underground shaft — could cost upwards of $100 million.

“The cost is astronomical for something that offers very little practical benefit,” Hinderstein said.

The U.S. does have a facility capable of hosting underground tests: the Nevada Test Site, about 65 miles north of Las Vegas, deep under Ranier Mesa. The last American nuclear warhead was exploded there in 1992. That site has hosted nearly all U.S. tests since 1962, the year before the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty prohibited aboveground, underwater, and space-based nuclear detonations.

But experts warn that resuming testing now would be complicated and costly. Hinderstein explained that a “new vertical shaft” would need to be drilled to avoid disrupting other work at the site.

Paul Dickman, a retired senior policy fellow at Argonne National Laboratory who spent almost 14 years at the NNSA, noted that the workforce that once ran these tests was highly specialized. “They were not bureaucrats. They were not a PowerPoint crowd. They had a lot of dirt under their fingers,” he said.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, the NNSA has lost much of that expertise. Senior civil servants were fired during what critics call the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency purge. More employees are now on furlough amid ongoing government shutdowns.

“Those are the people who build the weapons, who do the enrichment of the material, who test the existing stockpile,” Nevada Representative Dina Titus, a Democrat, told The Washington Post.

Despite the challenges, former Obama administration energy secretary Ernest Moritz said that if Trump’s goal is merely to set off a nuclear device as a “stunt,” it could be done.

“If all you wanted was a stunt — to say okay, you set off a nuclear explosive, don’t worry about the data — you would probably take one of the weapons out of reserve, strip it down somewhat and then just set it off,” Moritz said.

Moritz, a nuclear physicist and co-chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, added that such a “stunt” test could be ready in “maybe a year.”

But critics say the expense, technical hurdles, and risks make any live test a questionable move. With costs easily exceeding $100 million per detonation, and much of the expert workforce gone, Americans could end up footing a massive bill for a test that provides little useful data.

Even for Trump, who has described the move as a way to “keep America strong,” the practical payoff remains unclear. Experts caution that the focus should be on maintaining and modernizing the nuclear stockpile safely, rather than staging costly explosions with minimal scientific return.

Featured image via The Daily Glitch Gallery