Trump claimed that China was rapidly building its nuclear stockpile, citing that as among the reasons to justify his decision, just before he began a much-anticipated summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping that yielded a deal on tariffs and rare earth metals.
The US president’s decision also came days after he criticised Russia for testing a new nuclear-powered missile called the Burevestnik. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote: “Because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” The Trump administration has renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War.
In the post, Trump said that while the US has “more Nuclear Weapons than any other country”, China “will be even within 5 years”.
Minutes later, Trump entered a meeting with China’s Xi in South Korea, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. It’s unclear why Trump suggested that China could catch up with the US’s arsenal of nuclear warheads in five years.
It is true that while the US and Russia have been slowly retiring some of their nuclear weapons, China has been expanding its stockpile – up from 350 in 2022, according to the Federation of American Scientists, to 410 in 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). On October 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that his country had successfully tested the nuclear-powered Burevestnik cruise missile.
A day later, Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that Putin should focus on ending the war with Ukraine rather than testing missiles.
On Wednesday, Putin said Moscow had successfully tested a new atomic-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone, the Poseidon, on Tuesday. The Russian president said about the Poseidon: “There is nothing like this in the world in terms of the speed and the depth of the movement of this unmanned vehicle – and it is unlikely there ever will be.”
A nuclear-powered platform or weapon – whether an aircraft carrier, missile or drone – draws its propulsion from nuclear fission instead of traditional fuels. But a nuclear-powered object isn’t automatically a nuclear weapon: nuclear power also generates a 10th of the world’s electricity.
A nuclear-capable weapon, like the Poseidon, could, however, become a nuclear weapon: It is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. But for now, Russia has tested these weapons without any nuclear warhead.
Source: Here
