Beyond Nuclear International
Trump threatens to resume nuclear testing
But does that word (testing) mean what he thinks it means?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Editor’s Note: The Department of Energy has since clarified that there will be no nuclear explosions of actual nuclear weapons and that it is “systems” not weapons that the US will be testing. Nevertheless, the original social media posting by Trump once more raised the specter of another insane nuclear arms race, arguably one we are already in.
US President Donald Trump says the US will start testing nuclear weapons again, a statement that has raised alarm in the peace movement and in nations across the world. According to news reports, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that “We’ve halted many years ago, but with others doing testing I think it’s appropriate to do so.”
Which other countries he is referring to — and exactly what kind of testing — remain opaque since none of the major nuclear weapon states have tested atomic weapons since the 1990s. However, both Russia and the United States have continued to test nuclear missile delivery systems. Russia also recently tested a nuclear-capable torpedo and cruise missile. However, none of these activities constitute actual nuclear weapons testing.
Nevertheless, Trump’s pronouncements prompted headlines around the world, raising concerns of further global destabilization. “If the US restarts testing its nuclear weapons, this will accelerate a new nuclear arms race,” Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament general secretary Sophie Bolt, told the Morning Star.
“I think a decision to resume nuclear testing would be extremely dangerous and would do more to benefit our adversaries than the United States,” Corey Hinderstein, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for Nuclear Peace, said on National Public Radio.
Russia last tested nuclear weapons in 1990, China in 1996 and India and Pakistan in 1998. Britain halted in 1991 and France in 1996. Only North Korea has tested since then, in 2017.
“Previous nuclear testing has left a catastrophic legacy of harm across the planet and caused devastating health impacts — cancer, birth defects, displacement, trauma — and poisoned land and water for generations,” said the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in a statement. ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. “The world has seen enough suffering caused by nuclear explosions and repeating those crimes would be indefensible.”
Read MoreThree women who speak for peace
Danaka Katovich interviewed three elders of the anti-nuclear movement about the still present threat of nuclear war
Dear young people who have never experienced war, ‘Wars begin covertly. If you sense it coming, it may be too late.’”—Takato Michishita, survivor of the bombing of Nagasaki.
On a rainy Saturday afternoon in the Catskill Mountains where New Yorkers went for the summer to escape the city heat, Alice Slater’s mother took her to go see a movie in town. It was late summer in 1945, and the second World War had just ended. Alice remembers parading around the Catskills town a few weeks earlier as everyone celebrated the end of the war. When I asked her when she first became aware of nuclear weapons, the first thing she thought to tell me was about her trip to the theater with her mom. Instead of trailers before the movies, they used to show news reels. The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima projected across the screen, and Alice asked her mom, “What is that?”
“That’s a wonderful new weapon, and now all the boys would come home,” her mom answered.
Between what they showed on the screen and what her mom had told her, at that moment Alice had no real idea what a nuclear bomb was, or what it did to the people it was used on. It was only a mushroom cloud, and the mushroom cloud meant the war was over.
Seventeen years later, Alice was a young mom who had moved to the suburbs of New York City. Her husband was working for CBS, and one day he didn’t come home—he had to stay at work to deal with breaking news for a handful of days. The world had just found out that the Soviet Union, bringing us to the height of the Cold War between Washinton and Moscow, put nukes just 90 miles off the coast of the United States in Cuba.
Read MoreRoll up, roll up for your free plutonium
Trump is preparing a dangerous giveaway to struggling commercial nuclear startups, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Imagine you are a commercial nuclear reactor startup company but you just can’t quite start up because there’s one little problem. Your “new” reactor design needs a special kind of fuel. And that fuel requires a particular ingredient: plutonium.
Plutonium is the trigger component of a nuclear bomb. The countries that developed nuclear weapons — as well as those that have reprocessed irradiated reactor fuel in order to separate the plutonium from uranium — have massive surplus piles of plutonium left over, an ever-present security threat.
Now imagine that a former board member of one of those struggling startup companies, Oklo, is Chris Wright, the current US Secretary of Energy in the Trump government. Lo and behold, all of a sudden, that same carnival barker who passes for a US president is offering your former company plutonium for free from a stockpile of close to 20 metric tons or more.
The White House has announced that it will begin revealing its lucky free plutonium recipients on December 31 based on applications received by the US Department of Energy by November 21, according to Reuters. The news agency put the plutonium surplus amount at 19.7 metric tons, although the Trump administration has suggested it has 25 tons to spare.
That amount, according to a letter sent to the Trump administration by one senator — Ed Markey — and two representatives— Don Beyer, John Garamendi — all Democrats — is enough for at least 2,000 nuclear bombs.
Dishing out plutonium “to private industry for commercial energy use,” the trio wrote in their September 10 letter, “goes against long-standing, bipartisan US nuclear security policy. It raises serious weapons proliferation concerns, makes little economic sense, and may adversely affect the nation’s defense posture.”
Read MoreFurious French fairies challenge nuclear plans
Frogtifa is just catching on in Portland, but French protesters have used street theatre for years. This summer’s anti-nuclear actions were no exception, reports Reseau sortir du nucléaire
Editor’s note: In her forthcoming book — No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress and Provokes War — to be published by Pluto Press next March, Linda Pentz Gunter describes the creative resistance of French protesters, including the anti-nuclear movement. “The French anti-nuclear movement,” she writes, “has engaged in protests that deliver considerable numbers, abundant creativity — and sometimes a lot of useful tractors as well. France also has a long theatrical tradition, and French anti-nuclear activists have invariably embraced that as well. They understand that street theater is an attention-getter. They also know it makes protesting a lot more fun.” The chapter features the “goat ZAD” mobilized by the Piscine Nucléaire Stop collective. Since then, they have “escalated,” as sortir du nucléaire describes in this article.
From July 18 to 20, 2025, in La Hague, “HARO” made its grand debut: three days of meetings and mobilization around nuclear waste and local communities. Nearly a thousand people from the Cotentin region and elsewhere responded to the call of the Piscine Nucléaire Stop collective to participate in round tables, workshops, concerts, screenings, hikes, and, of course, the big demonstration by the Fées furieuses (Furious Fairies). The event took place in a festive atmosphere of determination.
The name of the event set the tone: derived from Norman customary law, the interjection “Haro” was used to demand justice, even in the face of powerful oppressors. In the Cotentin Peninsula, it is Orano [owner of the La Hague reprocessing facility] that is attempting to impose its Aval du Futur mega-project.
The event, located on the La Hague plateau in a field lent by local farmers committed to the anti-nuclear cause, offered a breathtaking view of the Orano plant, when the fog didn’t interfere with the festivities. The typical La Hague weather did not discourage participants who had come from all over France to take part in meetings against waste, nuclear power, and the nuclear chain, with an intersectional approach.
Read MoreTireless advocacy delivers victory
A grand coalition and legal support won a hard-fought struggle to stop Holtec’s radioactive waste dump, writes Kevin Kamps
Holtec International and Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance’s (ELEA) joint scheme to construct and operate the world’s largest high-level radioactive waste dump, midway between Hobbs and Carlsbad, has been terminated. This is a hard-won environmental justice (EJ) victory, and brought about by the tireless work of countless Indigenous, as well as grassroots EJ, environmental, and public interest allies for more than a decade.Together they have successfully blocked a dangerous dump scheme and the many thousands of “Mobile Chornobyl” radioactive waste shipments its opening would have launched nationwide.
Beyond Nuclear has fought against this Holtec-ELEA consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) since it was first launched on “Nuclear Fool’s Day” (April 1), 2017, when Holtec’s CEO, Krishna Singh, publicly unveiled the CISF license application just submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), at a Capitol Hill press conference.
In fact, Beyond Nuclear and coalition allies wrote the NRC in October 2016, warning that CISFs — such as Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) in Texas, some 40-miles east of Holtec’s site — were illegal on their face, and urging the agency to cease and desist from processing such applications. NRC ignored our own warnings and those of others and proceeded with docketing the license applications.
Many years of intense NRC licensing proceedings on both Holtec and ISP’s CISFs, and related environmental reviews, followed. Our coalition engaged at every step, alongside environmental allies in New Mexico, Texas, and across the country. For example, we broke records, in terms of the number (many tens of thousands) of public comments opposing both dumps, at the environmental scoping, as well as the Draft Environmental Impact Statement stages, despite the latter taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The grassroots environmental coalition partners included Don’t Waste Michigan, et al. (Citizens’ Environmental Coalition of New York, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination in Michigan, Demanding Nuclear Abolition (formerly Nuclear Issues Study Group) of New Mexico, Nuclear Energy Information Service in Illinois, Public Citizen’s Texas Office, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace of California, and Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition in Texas), as well as Sierra Club chapters in New Mexico and Texas. Together, we generated many dozens of contentions in NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board proceedings, all of which were rejected, with those rulings rapidly upheld by the NRC Commissioners despite our appeals.
Read More‘Solar for All’ should mean just that
An EPA decision to cancel a solar grant to tribal nations is a hard hit, writes Cody Two Bears
The EPA’s decision to cancel its Solar for All grant to our coalition of tribal nations is more than a policy reversal—it’s a gut punch to communities that believed they were finally being seen.
Our coalition of 14 tribal governments spanning North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin, and Wyoming came together around a once-in-a-generation opportunity: to deploy $100 million in solar infrastructure to more than 3,500 tribal homes, while training Native youth and veterans in a clean energy workforce that could serve their own communities.
That promise is now gone. And we are not alone.
This past month, dozens of other states, cities, and communities—red and blue alike learned that their own Solar for All awards contracts will be terminated. Across the country, tens of thousands of low-income households are being told that the solar systems they were promised won’t be installed. That the jobs and training they applied for may not materialize. That another chance to turn energy burden into energy security has slipped away.
In Indian Country, the pain is particularly deep. We’ve been here before. Our communities are used to being promised opportunities that never arrive. But that doesn’t make this one hurt any less.
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