Exclusive: Department of Energy officials to meet with White House to tamp down Trump’s idea of explosive nuclear testing

By Ella Nilsen, René Marsh, Alayna Treene, CNN

(CNN) — Top energy and nuclear officials in the Trump administration are planning to meet with the White House and National Security Council in the coming days to dissuade President Donald Trump from resuming testing of the nation’s nuclear weapons, sources told CNN.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, National Nuclear Security Administration leader Brandon M. Williams and officials from the US National Laboratories are planning to inform the White House that they do not think blowing up weapons for nuclear warhead testing, as Trump suggested last month, is tenable, two sources familiar with the matter said. They asked not to be named to discuss a sensitive matter.

It’s the latest sign of fallout from Trump’s October social media post instructing the Department of Defense to start testing nuclear weapons “because of other countries testing programs.”

But NNSA, which falls under the Department of Energy, is the federal agency responsible for building and testing bombs and maintaining the nuclear stockpile, not the Defense Department.

A White House official reiterated on Thursday that “because of other countries’ testing programs, President Trump has instructed the Department of War and Department of Energy to test our nuclear weapons on an equal basis.”

“Nothing has been eliminated from consideration as all decision-making authority lies with the President,” the White House official added.

CNN has reached out to the Department of Energy.

Today, the US tests every part of its nuclear weapons systems except for the explosive nuclear material in warheads. The last full-scale nuclear weapons test was done in the US in 1992, and the practice was banned by former President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Trump’s recent suggestion the US could resume nuclear testing comes after Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted in October that Moscow had successfully tested a Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo.

“The reason I’m saying — testing is because Russia announced that they were gonna be doing a test,” Trump told “60 Minutes” recently. “If you notice, North Korea’s testing constantly. Other countries are testing,” he said, adding: “I don’t wanna be the only country that doesn’t test.”

At the upcoming White House meeting, NNSA and DOE officials will be prepared to tell the administration that “there’s not going to be any testing” involving exploding nuclear materials and will seek to steer the White House into a workable plan that doesn’t involve blowing anything up, one source said.

The source said officials hoped it would give the president the opportunity to align himself with NNSA’s approach.

However, Trump has the authority to order the tests anyway if he doesn’t agree with the nuclear experts.

An NNSA spokesperson declined to comment. “NNSA does not comment on ongoing or potential private meetings with the White House, especially regarding matters of nuclear security,” NNSA spokesperson Mariza Smajlaj told CNN in a statement.

Mere minutes before he was due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in Korea last month, Trump took to Truth Social to say that he had directed the “Department of War” to “start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”

Inside the NNSA, Trump’s initial October suggestion was met with confusion, the sources said.

“Nobody saw this coming,” one of them said.

Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, told Fox News earlier this month that US nuclear tests are “system tests” and “not nuclear explosions.”

A senior White House official, when pressed this week on what exactly the president meant by his initial comments, told CNN that Trump was being “purposefully vague” in his calls to resume nuclear testing.

The official argued the president became fixated on the idea while on his trip to Asia, telling CNN that some foreign leaders brought the issue up to Trump directly while he was abroad.

Another administration official argued that they viewed the president’s comments as wanting to do more testing on nuclear-capable missiles, rather than detonating nuclear bombs.

So far, Trump’s comments haven’t changed agency policy: No plans are underway for exploding nuclear weapons for testing purposes. One source told CNN that no one in the administration has explained to those in the agency what exactly Trump meant by his comments.

NNSA officials recently prepared a memo for Wright and Williams outlining all the things the agency does to make sure its weapons are up to speed, including supercomputer bomb simulations and test flights of non-explosive warheads, the sources told CNN.

That memo also lays out what the timeline would be if the administration directed NNSA to go back to nuclear testing like Trump had suggested. One source said it would take 36 months of underground testing at a minimum to obtain scientifically useful data, but that timeline could get much longer if the federal government were sued by environmental or other groups to delay or stop the testing.

“If they wanted to just make the ground shake, you could probably do that sooner, but there wouldn’t be a purpose to the test beyond political signaling,” the source said.

If the US returned to nuclear testing, it would be done in Nevada – at the only underground site designed to explode nuclear weapons. That space sits on federal land in a vast desert, but the state government would also need to sign off on the testing – another thorny issue.

“There’s a big resistance from states about dealing with nuclear materials like we used to,” the source said.

There is also the matter of legacy cleanup of nuclear waste due to decades of nuclear testing in Nevada. Testing has had devastating health impacts on nearby downwind communities, from radiation exposure to illnesses like cancer.

There is no need for weapons testing, as the US still has a lot of “really good data” from Cold War-era nuclear testing, one of the sources said.

There are concerns that if the US resumed testing, China could also use it as an excuse to perform nuclear tests — something it says it is not currently doing — raising the geopolitical temperature across the globe.

Neither Beijing nor Moscow have tested a nuclear warhead in many decades, according to experts.

In response to questions about whether the Trump administration has more intelligence on Russia and China’s nuclear activities than what is publicly known, a person who worked in the West Wing during Trump’s first term, including on national security issues, told CNN: “It would be hard for either country to blow up nuclear warheads underground and keep that quiet. That’s not happening.”

CNN’s Kevin Liptak and Kylie Atwood contributed to this report

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