Tag Archives: International Monitoring System of Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty

Mushroom-shaped explosion rising over a barren desert landscape

Containing the Uncontainable: Nuclear Weapons Testing

Leave a reply

A major topic of diplomatic discussion  between United States and China has been U.S. allegations that China breached the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty of 1996, or CTBT.  The treaty isn’t legally in force because not enough nations have ratified it. As a result, the treaty’s provisions for conducting short-notice inspections aren’t in effect. But China, Russia and the U.S. say they are abiding by its terms. That treaty allows signatories to take steps to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons, including experiments involving fissile material, as long as they don’t result in a nuclear-explosive yield.

But the Trump administration has alleged that China has gone further by secretly carrying out very low-yield nuclear tests, including one at its Lop Nur site in northwest China in June 2020. Chinese officials have vociferously denied the accusation, putting the two sides squarely at odds. In October 2025, Trump said he would order the resumption of U.S. nuclear testing on an “equal basis” with China and Russia if those nations didn’t stop their suspected low-level tests….

The U.S. also is pushing China to provide transparency on its nuclear-force levels. China currently has over 600 nuclear weapons but is on track to have more than 1,000 by 2030, according to an annual Pentagon report on China’s military capabilities sent to Congress in 2025. “It’s hard to overstate the neuralgia that China has to any kind of meaningful discussion about arms control with the United States,” said Jonathan Czin of the Brookings Institution, a former senior U.S. intelligence official on China. “They really see it as a trap, and as a way for the United States, in their eyes, to contain and suppress China.”

Excerpt from Michael R. Gordon et al., Trump Administration Presses China on Suspected Nuclear Tests in Confidential Talks, WSJ, Sept. 24, 2026

Can it Be An Earthquake? Covering Up Nuclear Weapon Testing

1 Reply

In the afternoon on 22 June 2020, a seismic station in eastern Kazakhstan registered two small earthquakes 12 seconds 
apart near China’s Lop Nur nuclear test site. Closely spaced jolts can arise from underground explosions followed by a cavity collapse, or simply from earthquakes. U.S. officials in February 2026 asserted the shaking was from a clandestine nuclear detonation—an accusation that could sound the starting gun for a new global arms race…. Low-yield tests would help China refine weapons designs and probe plutonium properties as it expands from a stockpile of about 600 nuclear weapons to what the Pentagon projects will be roughly 1000 by 2030.

Such tests contravene the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which has not entered into force since the major nuclear powers, such as China and the United States, have not ratified it and Russia rescinded ratification in 2023. Renewed testing would also underscore the limitations of the CTBT and its International Monitoring System (IMS), a global network of instruments that can spot blatant treaty violations but is not equipped to distinguish low-yield tests from earthquakes or nonnuclear blasts.

Incentives for nuclear testing are strong. The U.S. is developing a new submarine-launched warhead, Russia is deploying hypersonic missiles nearly impossible to intercept, and China is ramping up its arsenal. All three powers need to ensure the reliability of new or existing warheads, and they may calculate that insights gleaned from low-yield tests outweigh the risks of adversaries following suit. Heightening concerns is the lapse this month of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), which capped U.S. and Russian deployed nuclear warheads at 1550 each.

In 2025, satellite images circulated of what appears to be a new laser fusion complex in Sichuan province akin to the U.S. National Ignition Facility, which weapons scientists use to simulate the intense temperatures and pressures of a thermonuclear explosion. Other imagery has spotted the excavation of three tunnels and 30-meter-tall rigs for drilling shafts at Lop Nur. Renny Babiarz, a geospatial analyst with AllSource Analysis, believes two shafts dug in the past few years are “most likely” for yield-producing nuclear tests.

Excerpt from Richard Stone, Allegations of a Chinese nuclear blast may reignite weapons testing, Science, Feb. 24, 20