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By Moving to Resume Testing, Trump Threatens the Global Nuclear Balance
The decision would undermine continued strategic stability and risks triggering a disastrous arms race.
Oct 30, 2025
President Donald Trump’s October 29 announcement that the United States will restart nuclear weapons testing after more than 30 years marks a dangerous turning point in international security.
The decision lacks technical justification and appears solely driven by geopolitical posturing.
Trump’s declaration comes after months of nuclear threats. The president ordered the moving of nuclear submarines to Russia’s shores back in August and again in October 2025. Just hours before meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea, Trump declared that “because of other countries testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.”
It is not clear what he means, since other countries are not nuclear testing, but if the US goes forward with it, such testing would end a moratorium that has been in place since 1992. There is also a question about whether he is calling for the resumption of nuclear explosive testing (conducted by the Department of Energy) or testing nuclear-capable weapons (conducted by the Pentagon).
Nevertheless the decision would threaten continued strategic stability and risks triggering a disastrous arms race.
Responding to Russia
Trump’s announcement follows Russia’s October 21 test of the Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic. According to Russia’s Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov, the missile was airborne for 15 hours and traveled 14,000 kilometers.
This context of the Russian test is crucial, but Russia did not detonate a nuclear weapon. This test, like Russia’s the test of the Poseidon nuclear-powered torpedo a week later, involved nuclear-powered delivery systems, and are considered nuclear-capable, but do not constitute a nuclear weapons test. Russia hasn’t conducted a nuclear weapons test since 1990. While these new delivery systems are worrying, they do not constitute a resumption of nuclear testing of the kind that Trump now proposes.
Resuming nuclear testing isn’t just a bargaining chip. It’s a gamble that risks undoing decades of restraint, and the world could be a lot less stable because of it.
The timing of President Trump’s announcement could not be worse for nuclear arms control. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last agreement limiting US and Russian nuclear weapons, expires in February 2026. For over a decade, New START has kept a cap on deployed warheads and compelled both sides to transparency through data exchanges and inspections. If this agreement expires, there would be no binding limits on the two countries’ nuclear arsenals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said in September 2025 that Moscow would be willing to extend New START’s quantitative limits for a year, as long as Washington reciprocates and “does not take steps that undermine or violate the existing balance of deterrence potentials.” President Trump called Putin’s proposal “a good idea.” Now, with this move to resume testing, Trump is threatening the global nuclear balance.
Russia will not take this lightly. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned in October 2025 that “if a country with the capability makes the erroneous decision to conduct nuclear tests, and Washington is clearly in our focus, then we will retaliate immediately.” Putin echoed the same sentiment that Moscow would respond to nuclear tests.
Signaling to China
China has been building up its nuclear arsenal, doubling from about 300 warheads in 2020 to around 600 in 2025. Beijing’s proposed 15th Five Year Plan links deterrence to “global strategic balance and stability.” However, Beijing hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 1996. China’s 2025 Victory Day parade rolled out five missile systems that could hit the US mainland. American analysts believe China could have over 1,000 warheads by 2030. Still, growing the arsenal and upgrading missiles isn’t the same as explosive nuclear testing.
China maintains that it won’t break its moratorium on nuclear tests and supports the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, even though it hasn’t ratified it. In October 2025, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun called China a “responsible nuclear-armed state” and reaffirmed the pledge. Now, Trump’s decision puts China in a tight spot: Stick to restraint while the US challenges international norms or initiate its own testing program to keep up.
The Need for Restraint and Diplomacy
Trump’s move looks like another round of “escalate to deescalate”: the idea that ramping up the threat forces rivals to come to the table on US terms. However, resuming nuclear testing isn’t just a bargaining chip. It’s a gamble that risks undoing decades of restraint, and the world could be a lot less stable because of it.
Bringing back nuclear weapons testing appears to be aimed at bringing Russia and China to the negotiation table for a trilateral arms control agreement, something Trump keeps pushing for. However, Beijing has argued that its nuclear stockpile is way too small to be part of any trilateral arms control deal.
If Russia and China answer with their own tests, nuclear restraint could go out the window.
Crucially, this decision runs counter to the principles of restraint and diplomacy. Instead of using America’s overwhelming advantage in conventional military power and nuclear deterrence to push for diplomatic negotiations, the administration seems set on flexing its muscles. A restraint-based foreign policy would instead focus on reducing nuclear dangers through diplomacy, maintaining the taboo against nuclear use, and building verification regimes.
The US maintains approximately 5,177 nuclear warheads, second only to Russia’s 5,459. China has just 600. Moreover, American scientists can now use advanced computer modeling to check if the bombs still work without explosive testing. So, there’s no technical reason to start testing again. Restarting nuclear tests now would almost definitely push Russia and China to do the same. Other nuclear-armed states might follow. It may also provide states that aspire to nuclear-armed status justification to develop their own nuclear weapons programs.
The test of President Trump’s “escalate to deescalate” approach will come in the months ahead. If Russia and China answer with their own tests, nuclear restraint could go out the window. What follows isn’t just another arms race. It’s something more complex, riskier, and a whole lot more dangerous than the Cold War, a competition that nearly ended humanity.
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Fall and Get Up: Lessons From Jules Feiffer
Get out there, fall on your butt if necessary, but then get up and soldier on.
Oct 25, 2025
It’s been more than nine months now since my friend, famed cartoonist Jules Feiffer, died, a week before his 96th birthday after continually warning me that the evil spirit that had descended on this country was leaving him frightened and dispirited. He was glad, he told me, that he was old and close to the end in an era he considered more dangerous than the Civil War and more treacherous than the Reconstruction era. He had, he insisted, lost both heart and hope. I found that difficult to take too seriously. After all, hadn’t he survived the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the McCarthy-era Red Scare, the nightmare of Vietnam, and the “Hard Year” of 1968, while being dubbed the greatest political satirist of his time?
And as it happened, he died only a few days after finishing a graphic memoir, “A License to Fail,” which stunned me with its insight and wit. It reminded me of the shock and awe he had evoked 60-odd years earlier with his spindly cartoons in New York’s Village Voice harpooning the hypocrisies of the government of that era, the developing war in Vietnam of that moment, and the self-delusions of his liberal audience, which still prevail.
The difference between Jules’s work then and now, however, was his emotional motivation. Anger had fueled his Vietnam Era cartoons. In the age of Donald Trump, he was, he assured me, “fed up.”
As he told me recently, “Dr. King said the arc of history bends toward the good, but I say the arc is up for grabs and can move in directions we don’t dare think about. Like civil war. Like the American dream becoming the American con job.”
“Maybe my old age and fartism need to be factored in here, but to my mind Republican politicians just aren’t American citizens."
And yet, for all his pessimism, I found Jules at 95 a beacon of hope. Amid the rising negativity and growing passivity of our increasingly endangered world, he never gave up.
To combat his macular degeneration, he taught himself to look around corners as he drew. He could barely walk a block, but somehow, he still managed to do so. His heart, lungs, and kidneys were on speed dial to the ambulance corps and he was all too frequently hospitalized. Yet he just kept coming back.
Jules was anything but modest. He readily agreed with me that he was a national treasure. As I assured him more than once, I considered him my personal reward for getting old and distinctly an inspiration to keep on going. After all, by the time we met and became dear friends, I was almost 80 and he was almost 90. He agreed I was right.
For five years, from 2017 to 2022, Jules and his wife Joan lived in my small Long Island town, Shelter Island. Jules made me breakfast almost every Sunday morning. Always scrambled eggs. He was incredibly precise about it, as much an artist when it came to those eggs as he was when it came to his acclaimed cartoons and book illustrations. He broke our eggs with a quick rap of a knife, whipped them in a bowl, slid them into a pan, and then shoveled my portion onto a plate and cooked his for another 30 seconds. As the apprentice and acolyte, I made the toast. I brought the food to the table. He always insisted on doing the dishes. Then we talked for at least two hours. Actually, Jules did most of the talking and I, most of the listening.
He said things like, “Maybe my old age and fartism need to be factored in here, but to my mind Republican politicians just aren’t American citizens. They don’t care about their constituents or the Constitution. Like the tobacco executives, they feel that killing your kids and grandkids is just the cost of doing business.”
Meeting the Masses
Jules was born in New York City’s the Bronx, a beanpole who said he hated his body and tried to have nothing to do with it. He claimed to have done only two push-ups in his whole life.
“I can’t do anything physical,” he would tell me. “My body’s just along for the ride. It’s there to carry my head and nothing more. Now I find myself in this old man’s body which still has no relation to me. I have no sense of direction. I used to rage at myself. Now, I just start every trip at least a half hour early.”
His proficiency with computers, phones, cars, and the like was virtually nonexistent and he resisted instruction. (“Machines hate me,” he said.) But he still had a remarkable talent for sponging up information and ideas. One Christmas long, long ago, his sister, a Stalinist, gave him a history of cartooning that introduced him to the radical writer Max Eastman’s controversial socialist magazine The Masses.
“It blew a hole in my mind,” Jules told me. “It gave me permission not just to be a boy cartoonist, but to say something. Then the Army radicalized me, focused my rage. I couldn’t hate my family because I thought they had my best interests at heart, but the Army didn’t, not with their lying and ethical abuse. The Army made me an angry satirist.”
He was drafted into the Army in 1951 during the Korean War and ended up doing animation for the Signal Corps. He never went to college and dropped out of art school. Early on, he was filled with pretension and rage and, as he matured, became something of an intellectual bad boy, the only proper response, he came to believe, to an evil, unfair world.
Those hours I spent with Jules sometimes expanded into lunches with a mutual friend, the actor Harris Yulin, who lived in nearby Bridgehampton. A brilliant Shakespearean teacher and director, Harris made his living as a mostly nefarious cop, judge, or government official in blockbuster movies like Scarface and Clear and Present Danger. On stage, he also played President Richard Nixon, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Sen. Joe McCarthy.
Harris was my age, and we both played the straight man for Jules, especially for his remarkable array of Zeligesque, non-fact-checked memories. When Harris, for instance, mentioned acting with Julie Andrews, Jules would promptly recall being at her wedding. When I mentioned reading William Styron, Jules instantly recounted a drunken evening with that well-known novelist on Martha’s Vineyard and then riffed on why novelists, who work alone and inside their heads, tend to be jerks, while playwrights, who work collectively, are mostly fine guys. Of course, Jules was both.
Once, after Harris mentioned a Philip Roth novel he was reading, Jules recalled sitting between Roth and Jackie Onassis at a dinner party. Jackie, he told us, placed a folded paper in Jules’s hand and asked him to pass it to Roth. A few days later, Jules asked Roth what was on the paper.
“Her phone number,” he replied.
“Have you called her yet?” asked Jules.
Roth made a face. “Are you kidding? Who wants photographers outside your house all night?”
When John Belushi’s name came up, Jules recalled meeting him in his building’s elevator as the young comedian was heading to his therapist. Jules introduced himself and invited him to stop by afterward. “Sweet guy, stayed for an hour,” he told us. “He asked me if being famous was a drag for me, too. I told him no, since people knew my name but never recognized the face.”
Frauds and Favorites
He was not shy about his opinions. Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, and Arthur Miller? All of them, he insisted, were overpraised frauds.
Really? Or had they annoyed him one drunken night at that legendary New York hangout Elaine’s, a second home for Jules?
On the other hand, the comedians, Lenny Bruce, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, whose bold work he felt had empowered him, the ones who had given him permission to dare, couldn’t be praised enough. Nor could humorist Robert Benchley, whose “schmucky WASP characters” led Jules to his own alter ego character, Bernard Mergendeiler, who wasn’t assertive enough either to get his order taken at a restaurant or even get the elevator operator to stop at his floor. Of those who followed Jules, he particularly liked Doonesbury‘s Garry Trudeau and the Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart.
He didn’t live long enough to see the vested interests he loathed be beaten. I hope we do.
Jules and I regularly talked about politics. He had, he felt, been disappointed all too often. The only time he actually campaigned for a candidate was when the acclaimed journalist Sy Hersh persuaded him that Eugene McCarthy’s election was critical to the fate of the nation. Jules was at a hotel in Chicago for the Democratic Convention of 1968, drinking with radio personality Studs Terkel, when he saw a group of young workers for the presidential campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy being driven into the hotel’s plate-glass windows by cops who were beating them with their batons. Calls to McCarthy upstairs were fruitless. He refused to come down. Jules quit the campaign.
For all the betrayals he felt he had experienced, he still believed that he had lived a lucky life. Half a century ago, over scotch at the Des Artistes bar in New York City, Irwin Hasen, cocreator of the comic strip Dondi, had characterized it to him this way: “I can’t believe we’re getting away with this!” Jules agreed that it was indeed amazing to get paid for what you had always wanted to do as a kid.
There were, of course, bumps in the road—periods of alcoholism and two unhappy marriages. In the late 1950s, he drew ads for a bank until a reviewer for the New York Times, Herbert Mitgang, gently suggested that he not sell out. He stopped, he told me, and by doing so changed his life. In the end, he would win an Oscar for an animated short film, Munro, about a 4-year-old drafted into the Army, a Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons, and two Obies for his off-Broadway plays, Little Murders and The White House Murder Case. That, of course, didn’t stop him from complaining that he had never won an Emmy or a Tony.
Thinking about Jules
At some point on those Shelter Island Sundays we spent together, he would abruptly tell me to go home. Joan would be waking up soon and would need her coffee. In any case, he needed his nap.
Even now, on Sunday afternoons, I imagine Jules heading upstairs, leaving me feeling both abandoned and happily sated with his insights, one-liners, and energizing BS. I think he was the smartest, most complex person I ever knew, someone who could be both heartwarmingly kind and charmingly nasty, often in quick succession.
More than once, he said to me, “The blessing of Covid-19 is I don’t have to go to those fucking parties where I never hear anything anyway from people who don’t have much to say in the first place.”
But, of course, he went to those parties. That was the giveaway. The gawky kid from the Bronx loved the acclaim of all those people who still told him how his 60s cartoons in the Village Voice had exposed the hypocrisy of all their friends and neighbors; how the movie he scripted, Carnal Knowledge, prepared us for understanding toxic masculinity and the Me Too movement; how his children’s books brought out the imagination in all ages.
And he worked every day. On the Island, he sat cramped at a tiny table by the door. When he and his wife moved to upstate New York, he sprawled in a splendid studio overlooking a meadow and a lake. From both, in recent years, the results included an acclaimed children’s book, Amazing Grapes, and his as-yet-unpublished graphic memoir that stunned me with its insight and wit, A License to Fail.
That license, which he always insisted to students was critical to success, was the key to the bold surprise in his own work. Get out there, fall on your butt if necessary, but then get up and soldier on. I got to watch some of the failing and successful soldiering on of his last two books, the revising and rewriting, the precision of cracking the eggs of thought and cooking them to perfection. A practically blind, deaf, immobile old man in his 90s, he pumped up my own ambition. Once dismissed on those Sunday afternoons, I headed for my own desk.
I would think about what he had said. I might even dip back into the work of the two journalists who, in the last century, gave him permission to push on, I.F. Stone and Murray Kempton—and the one he admired now, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and wonder, as he did, where we lost our Mr. Smith Goes to Washington confidence. Remember when we believed that all you had to do was expose the evil vested interests and they would be defeated?
Time ran out on Jules Feiffer. Sadly enough, he lived deep into but not out of the era of Donald Trump. He didn’t live long enough to see the vested interests he loathed be beaten. I hope we do. Certainly, Jules left us the words and pictures we need to inspire us to beat them. To keep going; fall and get up; fail and, in the end, succeed.
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UN Expert Says All Nations With Ties to Israel 'Responsible in Some Measure' for Gaza Genocide
Francesca Albanese wrote that states that supported Israel financially and militarily "could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting, or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts."
Oct 23, 2025
A report by one of the United Nations’ leading experts on Israel-Palestine describes the more than two years of genocide in Gaza as a “collective crime,” for which all nations with financial, diplomatic, and military ties with Israel are culpable.
The draft report, published Monday, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who is expected to speak at length on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza this weekend as part of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s lecture series in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Her report names more than 60 countries, without which she says the systematic destruction of Gaza—which has killed or injured more than 10% of the strip’s population and displaced nearly everyone there—would not have been possible.
“Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this livestreamed atrocity has been facilitated through third states’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection, and, in some cases, active participation,” Albanese wrote. “The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met, and justice is upheld.”
Her report says that the states most responsible are “primarily Western ones,” the United States being chief among them.
The US accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s annual arms imports. And according to a report out this week from the Center for International Policy, it has spent over $38 billion since October 2023, both directly arming Israel through military grant programs and waging war against its enemies in Iran, Lebanon, and other nations across the Middle East.
Under both a Democratic and Republican administration, the US has also provided critical diplomatic cover for Israel, proposing temporary “pauses” and “truces” to the conflict before international bodies, “sidestepping a permanent ceasefire and ensuring a continuation of the violence.”
On several occasions, the US has used its veto power to block unanimous votes in favor of a binding ceasefire resolution by the UN Security Council. In September, it did so for the fifth time, vetoing a 14-1 resolution that would have required both parties to halt the violence and release all hostages.
The US has sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Trump administration also placed Albanese herself under sanctions in July for her support of the ICC’s efforts.
American non-governmental organizations supported by US President Donald Trump were also directly involved with the creation and administration of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which administered aid sites after humanitarian organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were pushed out. In just over three months, more than 1,000 Palestinian aid seekers were killed in routine massacres by Israeli troops, who have described the GHF sites as “killing fields.”
Many senior US politicians, Albanese said, have helped to prolong the genocide through rhetoric that frames Israeli lives as more important and worthy of protection than Palestinian ones.
“Israelis were depicted as ‘civilians’ and ‘hostages,’ and Palestinians as ‘Hamas terrorists,’ ‘legitimate’ or ‘collateral’ targets,’ ‘human shields’ or lawfully detained ‘prisoners,’” she wrote.
Albanese also singled out many European nations as particularly culpable. These include Germany, which provided Israel with over $565 million worth of weapons, making it the second-largest exporter behind the US; and the United Kingdom, which has participated in hundreds of surveillance missions over Gaza and whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, defended Israel’s right to cut off water and power to civilians at the war’s outset.
She also called out others that increased trade with Israel during the two years of genocide—Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, Denmark, and France—as well as Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. She said their continued economic support not only “legitimizes and sustains the Israeli apartheid regime” but “countered the trade decline Israel might otherwise have faced” as a result of its increasing global isolation.
Albanese wrote that for helping Israel, which she described as a “genocidal apartheid state,” these nations “could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting, or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts.”
Though a ceasefire is now in effect between Israel and Gaza, Albanese said on Wednesday that the plan, which currently has Israel occupying more than half the Gaza Strip, was “absolutely inadequate and it doesn’t comply with international law.”
She said that the recognition of a Palestinian state by several Western nations in recent months has “been a pretense of doing something while the emergency was to discuss... how we stop the genocide.”
Albanese said that the states “who still have ties with Israel, diplomatic, but especially economic, political, and military ties, are all responsible in some measure.”
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